olute power, the resulting vacuum and the condition of the country under the weak Articles of Confederation surely was a political power vacuum, if ever there was one did not draw forward some other Napoleon figure, but led instead to a process of fundamentally legal character: the convening of the Constitutional Convention, and the drafting, ratification, and adoption of the Constitution itself.
Indeed, the American Revolution, taken as a whole, has very much the character of a lawyer's revolution. It originated in disputes over the legality of particular enactments, such as the Stamp Act. It culminated in the Declaration of Independence. We, today, most often look at the Declaration in philosophical terms, discussing fine points of such questions as whether "natural rights" come from God, or from human nature, and so forth. But the whole of the Declaration is really a sort of legal document: in essence, the summary of a case. It sets forth general principles of law, specific abuses, the failure of redress, and at the ve
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