Jack Ferguson, a law clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, has posted The Ciceronian Origins of American Law and Constitutionalism:
In his treatise on American constitutionalism, John Adams wrote that “as all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united than Cicero, his authority should have great weight.” This Article considers the Founding generation’s intellectual debt to Marcus Tullius Cicero, the classical Roman statesman-philosopher, and what it tells us about how the Founders approached law and constitutionalism. There are ongoing scholarly efforts to recover the general law tradition and classical lawyering of the eighteenth century, but as of yet, no account has been given of Cicero’s prominent role in that era. This Article gives that account.
Cicero (NYPL)
This Article first examines Cicero’s legal thought and how it shaped notions of natural law and the law of nations (or general law) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Grotius, Pufendorf, Coke, Vattel, Blackstone, Lord Mansfield, James Wilson, Joseph Story, and others grounded their work in Cicero’s writings on law. As a case study, this Article shows how Cicero contributed to the formation of American judicial review. Cicero’s interpretive principles dealing with hierarchies of law were adopted by Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton’s prominent defense of judicial review.
This Article then considers Cicero’s work on republicanism and constitutionalism. The Founding generation’s concepts of popular sovereignty, mixed government, checks and balances, and the rule of law can be traced back to Cicero, who was the primary expositor of the classical republican tradition.
Finally, this Article evaluates Cicero’s influence on eighteenth-century notions of the ideal executive. As a constitutional theorist, Cicero laid the conceptual groundwork for Hamilton’s unitary energetic executive. And by his historical example as consul of Rome, Cicero inspired Hamilton’s efforts in the Washington administration to put down the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, an early historical precedent on insurrection and the domestic use of military force.
Cicero influenced the Founders’ work in numerous ways. To the extent their law is ours today, his relevance endures.
Mr. Ferguson cites a classic essay that should be read by anyone interested in the nineteenth-century American legal profession: Stephen Botein's Cicero as Role Model for Early American Lawyers: A Case Study in Classical “Influence," Classical Journal 73 (1978).
