amended by subsequent statutes (excepting such statutes as were confined to 
the realm) were the only certain rule of law in judicial proceedings. But following 
the Stamp Act it had been advanced that acts of Parliament were 
binding on the colonies only so far as adopted by them. 226 Further, the doctrine 
was enunciated that acts of Parliament contrary to the natural rights of 
the colonists were ipso facto void, on the basis of Coke's dictum in Bonham's 
Case. 221 Hutchinson proposed to resolve the uncertainty by an act of Parliament 
determining that the common law as amended by statute should be the 
rule of law in every colony except where any alteration had been or should 
be made by colonial enactment. 228 
A later opinion in Pennsylvania reflects continuation of ideas at variance with 
the doctrine of the English cases. In 1768 legal neophyte Edward Burd was 
informed that the general rule of the nonextension of acts of Parliament made 
since the settlement of the colonies was liable to many exceptions. Certain 
statutes such as 3 and 4 Anne, c. 9, and 4 Anne, c. 16, 229 had been frequently 
adjudged to extend to Pennsylvania. This was bewildering advice to tender a 
budding lawyer without appending a complete list of acts which were regarded 
to be in force. The truth is that probably no lawyer in any province could have 
said with certainty what parts of the English statute books were in use at the 
eve of the Revolution. Anyone who has examined colonial lawyers' briefs of 
the period cannot fail to be aware of the fact that unless a case raised points 
which directly put in issue the extension of an act of Parliament such statutes 
were constantly cited together with English judicial opinions as the law prevailing 
in a particular jurisdiction. And on frequent occasions, when the 
courts thought the rule of a recent statute to be salutary, they proceeded to 
absorb it into practice without worrying over the way the rule had originated 
230 Clearly the political disputes about parliamentary enactments that 
became so furious after 1765 were directed at problems of a different cut and 
color than those which bothered a lawyer concentrating upon prevailing litiga- 
226 26 MS Mass. Archives (Hutchinson Corres., 
1761-70), 197-228. 
227 Ibid., 183, 202. Hutchinson stated that 
"Lord Coke's authority is often abused to serve 
particular purposes and when he says in Bonham's 
Case that the common law shall sometimes 
judge Acts of Parliament to be void, no 
notice is taken of what he says in the same 
case that they who make them would not put 
them in execution. When this shall be the sense 
of those who make Acts of Parliament for taxing 
the colonists, Lord Coke's authority may 
more properly, than at present, be adduced to 
justify courts of judicature and private subjects 
in the non observance of these Acts" (25 MS 
Mass. Archives [Hutchinson Corres., 1741-73], 
129-30). See in this connection the argument 
of James Otis in Paxton's Case of the Writ of 
Assistance, Quincy Rep. 51, 474 (1761), and 
Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted 
and Proved (1764), 72-73. 
228 27 MS Mass. Archives (Hutchinson Corres., 
1770-74), 30. Cf. 26 ibid., 228. 
229 Edward Burd, MS Notes on Law, 1766-69, 
117 (August 28, 1768), in the Shippen MSS 
(Pa. Hist. Soc). On the extension of penal 
laws to Maryland in 1771 see Steiner, Life and 
Administration of Sir Robert Eden, 16 Johns 
Hopkins Univ. Studies (1898), 48. 
230 For example, 4 Geo. 111, c. 10, authorized 
the granting of a quietus on a recognizance forfeited 
through ignorance. The New York Su-