Anglicizing the United States Constitution: James Bryce's Contribution to Australian Federalism

John S. F. Wright

Publius: The Journal of Federalism, vol. 31, issue 4, 107-130

Abstract: James Bryce's analysis of American federalism made it possible for the Australian founders to reproduce federal institutions on the American model without replicating the republican and empirical ideas that underpinned them in the United States Constitution. Bryce's account in The American Commonwealth (1888) appealed to Australia's founders because it was suited to their needs. Bryce was English, and, like a sensible nineteenth-century Englishman, he argued that U. S. institutions had little to do with intellectual product. Instead, they were largely English institutions adapted to American purposes. Reading Bryce, Australia's founders assumed that if federal institutions had little to do with abstract theory, and had simply been adapted to American circumstances, they might also be adapted to Australian circumstances. Thus, Bryce's approach to American federalism allowed Australia's founders to substitute their own colonial tradition of parliamentary democracy under the Crown for the republican principles of rights and the separation of powers that underlie the U.S. Constitution. Copyright , Oxford University Press.

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