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Thomas Macintyre Cooley, Constitutional History of the United States as Seen in the Development of American Law, 1890

Born in 1824, Thomas Cooley was a distinguished lawyer, jurist and professor who served on the Michigan Supreme Court from 1864 until 1885, spending most of that time as Chief Justice. He authored a number of influential works on American Constitutional Law, as well as editing a four-volume publication of William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. Most of the American legal tradition was based on the British Common Law inheritance embodied by Blackstone, but as the Constitutional History’s introduction points out there was no British tradition of Constitutional Law as Britain had no written constitution. Constitutional Law was therefore a branch of jurisprudence which was ‘peculiarly the pride and glory’ of the American tradition, which by the time of the book’s publication had a century of development and evolution.

Steeped in the ideology of the British Empire, Australian lawyers of the early twentieth century wanted to base their precedential arguments squarely on the British tradition.  But when it came to Constitutional Law they had to look elsewhere, frequently to the United States, which while it was now independent, had at least the recommendation that it was a direct offshoot of the British tradition. The copy of Constitutional History contained in Menzies’s collection is an artefact of that Australian attempt to borrow, or at least learn, from American legal precedent. Speaking to this is the fact that Menzies’s copy was previously owned by Australian High Court Justice Henry Bournes Higgins. We do not know how deeply Menzies was influenced by Cooley, but we do know from his memoir Afternoon Light that over Menzies’s life he became convinced that America and Australia had a natural affinity based on shared values, legal systems, and the extent to which the Australian Constitution was based on its American counterpart. After Menzies retired from the Prime Ministership he even lectured on Australian constitutional developments in the United States, bringing the process of legal cultural intermixing full circle.