Bessler on Cesare Beccaria's Forgotten Influence on American Law

John D. Bessler, University of Baltimore School of Law and Georgetown University Law Center, is publishing The Italian Enlightenment and the American Revolution: Cesare Beccaria's Forgotten Influence on American Law in volume 37 of the Hamline Journal of Public Law and Policy on American Law (2017). Here is the abstract.

The influence of the Italian Enlightenment — the Illuminismo — on the American Revolution has long been neglected. While historians regularly acknowledge the influence of European thinkers such as William Blackstone, John Locke and Montesquieu, Cesare Beccaria’s contributions to the origins and development of American law have largely been forgotten by twenty-first century Americans. In fact, Beccaria’s book, Dei delitti e delle pene (1764), translated into English as On Crimes and Punishments (1767), significantly shaped the views of American revolutionaries and lawmakers. The first four U.S. Presidents — George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — were inspired by Beccaria’s treatise and, in some cases, read it in the original Italian. On Crimes and Punishments helped to catalyze the American Revolution, and Beccaria’s anti-death penalty views materially shaped American thought on capital punishment, torture and cruelty. America’s foundational legal documents — the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the U.S. Bill of Rights — were themselves shaped by Beccaria’s treatise and its insistence that laws be in writing and be enforced in a less arbitrary manner. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin studied Italian and read or spoke the language to one degree or another, and many early Americans also had a fascination with Italian history and the civil law. Though On Crimes and Punishments is focused largely on the criminal law, the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights — written documents protecting individual rights — echo the Beccarian idea of a fixed code of laws. Not only did leading figures of the Italian Enlightenment mold Beccaria’s work, but Beccaria’s treatise — now more than 250 years old — influenced a whole host of European and American thinkers, from Jeremy Bentham to Gaetano Filangieri and from James Wilson to Dr. Benjamin Rush. Beccaria’s ideas on government and the criminal justice system thereby profoundly shaped American law.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A New Book On Cesare Beccaria and His Relationship To the American Revolution

John D. Bessler has published The Birth of American Law: An Italian Philosopher and the American Revolution (Carolina Academic Press, 2015). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

The Birth of American Law: An Italian Philosopher and the American Revolution tells the forgotten, untold story of the origins of U.S. law. Before the Revolutionary War, a 26-year-old Italian thinker, Cesare Beccaria, published On Crimes and Punishments, a runaway bestseller that shaped the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and early American laws. America’s Founding Fathers, including early U.S. Presidents, avidly read Beccaria’s book—a product of the Italian Enlightenment that argued against tyranny and the death penalty. Beccaria’s book shaped American views on everything from free speech to republicanism, to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” to gun ownership and the founders’ understanding of “cruel and unusual punishments,” the famous phrase in the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment. In opposing torture and infamy, Beccaria inspired America’s founders to jettison England’s Bloody Code, heavily reliant on executions and corporal punishments, and to adopt the penitentiary system. The cast of characters in The Birth of American Law includes the usual suspects—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison. But it also includes the now little-remembered Count Luigi Castiglioni, a botanist from Milan who—decades before Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America—toured all thirteen original American states before the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Also figuring in this dramatic story of the American Revolution: Madison’s Princeton classmate William Bradford, an early U.S. Attorney General and Beccaria devotee; John Dickinson, the “Penman of the Revolution” who wrote of Beccaria’s “genius” and “masterly hand”; James Wilson and Dr. Benjamin Rush, signers of the Declaration of Independence and fellow Beccaria admirers; and Philip Mazzei, Jefferson’s Italian-American neighbor at Monticello and yet another Beccaria enthusiast. In documenting Beccaria’s game-changing influence, The Birth of American Law sheds important new light on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the creation of American law. This book is part of the Legal History Series, edited by H. Jefferson Powell, Duke University School of Law.

The Birth of American Law was awarded the 2015 Scribes Book Award and the First Prize in the 2015 AAIS Book Award competition (in the 18th/19th century category). It was also named INDIEFAB's 2014 Gold Winner for History.