Editing Massachusetts Body of Liberties (section)

== The Massachusetts Body of Liberties ==

Complete text, with original spelling, taken from S. Whitmore, Bibliographical Sketch of the Laws of Massachusetts Colony (1889), 32–60.

December 1641

By 1641 the colony had existed long enough to require a systematic summary of the laws already enacted, which would also serve as a bulwark against arbitrary government. The General Court adopted a code that was proposed by Nathaniel Ward of Ipswitch. As a devout Puritan and a former lawyer in England, Ward drew heavily on the code of law proposed by John Cotton in 1636, which was based on Mosaic principles, and on the English common law. The result of this blend was the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, one of the most important and underappreciated documents in American history. The U.S. Bill of Rights a century and a half later would contain twenty-six specific rights in its ten provisions. At most, seven of these rights can be traced to Magna Carta, the English Petition of Right (1628), or the English Bill of Rights (1689). Seven others can be traced in their origin to the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, which also included the seven English-originated rights and four more rights that were first codified in Massachusetts prior to 1641. All but three of the remaining rights in the U.S. Bill of Rights would originate in other colonial documents.1 The Massachusetts Body of Liberties, however, did not make these rights explicitly inalienable in that they could be altered by the legislature—this differentiation remained for the future. Still, Massachusetts did not abandon these rights in its later codes, and the egalitarian nature of the Body of Liberties contrasted sharply with English common law in 1641, when different parts of the population had differing rights. The Massachusetts Body of Liberties is considered the first postmedieval, or modern, bill of rights.