And we are entitled to our own culture. How sad is it that I have to argue that we the people should be able to determine our culture. Anyway, you do realize that our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, etc are based on English common law.

Lindenen, I’ve got several problems with this, the most major one being that it’s just flat wrong. Mistaken. Ahistorical.

No question that a lot of people here were of British descent, and that they were aware of English Common Law, but the whole founding of the United States was the result of literally the violent rejection of the British system. While there are certainly traces of the Common Law, there’s plenty of evidence that the Constitution and Declaration were influenced by everything from the history of the Roman Republic, to the Articles of the Iroquois League to Spinoza and Euclid. (“We hold these truths to be self-evident….”) Not to mention the influence of people like Adam Smith, Locke, Hume, Burke, George Mason, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson — possibly the most talent-filled, and most revolutionary, fifty years in human history.

One of the first jobs of the new Congress was the development of stated statutes to replace the “common law”, based on a written Constitution that replaced the unwritten, and infinitely mutable “constitution” of the United Kingdon.