Rights of Englishmen

[3][4] In the tradition of Whig history, Judge William Blackstone called them "The absolute rights of every Englishman".

[7][8][9] The American colonies had since the 17th century been fertile ground for liberalism within the center of European political discourse.

"[4] Owing to its inclusion in the standard legal treatises of the 19th century,[a] Calvin's Case was well known in the early judicial history of the United States.

[11] The Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley asserted that the "rights of Englishmen" were a foundation of American law in his dissenting opinion on the Slaughter-House Cases, the first Supreme Court interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, in 1873.

[b] The people of this country brought with them to its shores the rights of Englishmen, the rights which had been wrested from English sovereigns at various periods of the nation's history.... England has no written constitution, it is true, but it has an unwritten one, resting in the acknowledged, and frequently declared, privileges of Parliament and the people, to violate which in any material respect would produce a revolution in an hour.