Jennie Jeppesen has published "Tried and Attainted": Comparisons of the Application and Reception of the Common Law of Attaint in Virginia and New South Wales in Law and History Review:
Common Law, the shining cornerstone of the English Justice system, becomes a muddy pool when trying to uncover the ways in which it arrived into the early Virginian, Maryland, and early Eastern Australian colonies. This is particularly true for the common law of felony attainder. Attaint—social and legal death without physical death—had lasting implications on the question of legal personhood for the convicts transported from England to these colonies between 1614 and 1840. This article revisits the work done by Bruce Kercher, adding new primary research from the American colonies to enrich and challenge Kercher’s arguments. Expanding the primary source material used in the analysis gives us a deeper and more nuanced understanding about how attainder was received and applied in the colonies—in particular, in the American colonies—and a deeper understanding of outside forces that influenced property rights beyond that of the question of attainder. This article provides nuance to how common law was understood and applied by those with and without formal legal training in early developing colonial societies.--Dan Ernst
