"This is a study of Colonial Massachusetts publication of laws as enacted by its legislature, the General Court, during the seventeenth century. The first enactment was a simple broadsheet listing the colonys capital punishments known as the Capital Laws of 1642, followed by comprehensive collections known as the Laws and Liberties. They were published in three major editions in twelve-year increments beginning in 1648; the series last major edition issued in 1672, as England revoked the colonial charter when the 1684/5 iteration was in the final stages of publication. What first struck me when I picked up a copy of the initial 1648 edition was how out of place a printed collection of laws appeared in an English colony during what was long thought to be an era of "common law reception," when English practice had little use for manuscript or printed materials. Of course, parliamentary statutes were printed by the 1500s, but it was private not government printers who copy-edited and sent them to for-profit printers. Indeed, so little was the dependence on official publications for the actual practice of law that the initial government printing of the Statutes of the Realm, in 1810, included only laws enacted to 1714. Common law was administered in oral pleadings prepared and perfected in the Inns of Court, with statutory law incorporated into the vast corpus of English practice and traditions by the twelve common law justices at Westminster Hall. In this regard, US legal scholarship long held that the English colonies in North America had "received" English Common Law, even though a respective colonys adoption was not uniform with the rest, as each colony was thought to have implemented it on the basis of utility and practicality, according to its own needs and condition.

Since the original thirteen colonies were all under British sovereignty, its reasonable to wonder why Britain simply did not impose its common law throughout its new territories. One reason was that until the Glorious Revolution(1688-1689) Englands control over its North American colonies was tenuous at best. During this era the English monarchs royal administration, commonly referred to as "the crown," largely left the colonies to their own devices under self-governing charters. Although Virginia was created a dominion in the early 1620s, to be ruled directly by the crown in appointing government officials and approving laws, was initially granted a charter in 1606. While all of these territories were in a "colonial" status, most were lightly subjugated before the 1760s. The respective colonys self-interest also played an essential role in whether it would resist what ultimately became increasing attempts by the crown to exert control. As illustrated by Englands attempts to regulate colonial trade via its controversial Navigation Acts, American commercial activities adopted those English laws and customs that were conducive to the respective colonys interests, and naturally resisted those provisions that provoked colonial grievances. For example, the southern colonies were most closely bound to English trade as they depended on exporting "cash crops" like tobacco initially, and ultimately cotton, to English merchants who provided payment and credit in the form of finished goods to be shipped back across the Atlantic; in the future, southern plantation owners usually found themselves perpetually in debt except during their best harvest years, just as Englands mercantilist system intended.

Massachusetts, on the other hand, as the most prosperous and powerful New England colony could boast of a shipbuilding industry by the 1660s, and hearty international trade by the 1670s, which ultimately led to direct competition with Great Britain throughout the Caribbean. As Massachusetts balked at enforcing English trade laws, enforcement that would take money out of its own merchants pockets and the colonial economy, it established the odd practice of allowing local juries to sit in what otherwise would be recognized as Admiralty courts; "odd" since Englands Admiralty courts were presided over exclusively by judges. Bay colony juries repeatedly frustrated the crowns attempt to seize goods for transfer to the royal treasury. Massachusetts and other colonies dependent on trade had far less motivation to receive English law, but no other colony achieved such a status of virtual independence to reject its uniform adoption for most of the seventeenth century. Even so, traditionally, most US legal scholars and jurists took reception of common law at face value until the latter decades of the twentieth century, as a commonsense explanation particularly valuable to the new states as they created their own legal systems"--.