Illegitimacy in early America
Colonial America bastardy laws were laws, statutes, or other legal precedents set forth by the English colonies in North America.
This page focuses on the rules pertaining to bastardy that became law in the New England colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania from the early seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century.
The colonies established many laws based on a combination of old English common law and their religious faith.
European settlers established rules to guide society upon their arrival in North America.
Many of these rules strongly resembled the established guidelines set forth by England.
Although the laws differed initially in their creation and enforcement, by the late eighteenth century, the New England colonies and the colony of Pennsylvania had altered their laws pertaining to bastardy to be mirror images of the laws in effect in England.
Rule of man is a type of personal rule in an unaccountable rebounded society where rules change from ruler to ruler.
It is a society in which one person, regime, or a group of persons, rules arbitrarily.
While rule of man can be explained as the absence of rule of law, this theoretical understanding results in a paradox.
Realism dictates that man and law do not stand apart and that the rules of each are not opposites.
Rather law depends deeply on a state composed of men.
