Law as a Colonial Shell Game

Second Sinking of USS Maine After Having Been Raised and Towed Out of Havana Harbor in 1912. Original Sinking Feb. 15, 1898, Cost 260 Lives and Touched Off the Spanish-American War on the Claim it was Done by a Spanish Mine. Public Domain Photo by U.S. Navy. Subsequent Investigation Offered Evidence of Accident.

These United States have been both colonized and colonizer, so the law has to stretch a bit.

If you don’t know the name John Peter Zenger, your undergraduate education about the fundamental liberties American citizens expect is lacking and you should perhaps pick up a few biographies to read while working your way through the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers.

If you come at Zenger through politics, he stands for a free press. If you come through law, he stands for jury nullification. In either case, his footprint is very large among many big-footed colonists who were destined to get crosswise with the Mother Country.

Zenger missed most of the party because he died in 1746, at what was in his time a ripe age of 48. As was often the case in those days, he was a printer and publisher and editor and writer for one publication, The New York Weekly Journal.

When wearing his editor hat, he wrote opinions critical of the royal governor of New York, William Cosby. Wearing his publisher hat, he allowed his editor to let fly at the governor, which in the minds of some was an attack on the English monarch, under whose authority Cosby served.

The beef with this particular Bill Cosby had nothing to do with drugging women to take sexual…