Declaration Of Independence Is Illegal, Say British Lawyers

Was America founded on illegal grounds?

That's the argument advanced by a group of British lawyers who say the United States had no right to secede from Britain, according to the BBC.

American and British lawyers debated the issue at Philadelphia's Ben Franklin Hall on Tuesday.

According to the BBC, British lawyers argue that there are not and never were legal grounds to let a group of citizens establish their own laws just because they wanted to. The American argument is that government can only be "by the consent of the people and there comes a point when allegiance is no longer required in face of tyranny."

Foreign Policy muses, "In any case, wasn't breaking British laws kind of the point? Maybe next time we can debate the legality of colonizing other people's countries in the first place."

The debate winner was put to a vote and unsurprisingly, as Philebrity notes, the home team won.

Comments

[gary Nosacek]

03:39 PM on 10/26/2011

My mother is the last legal Cherokee in our family.
Maybe I'll argue with the Brit lawyers that they had
no legal right to be here in the first place! Only seems
fair...

[TClaudiusDrusus]

12:56 AM on 10/24/2011

I have to admit I'm rather frustrated with our form of government here in the States, replete as it is with ineffectiveness in a crisis, opacity and more than its fair share of complete buffoons. As long as we're going to be in the world dominating colonial power business, I say we're at least owed a gaggle of arrogant, omni-competent Oxbridge civil servants, a Parliament and an NHS, and few dandies and horsehair coiffed judges would also be nice for good measure. (Wouldn't it be nifty to have an official whose title was "Britanniarum Regnorumque Suorum Ceterorum Regina, Consortionis Populorum Princeps, Fidei Defensor"?) Accordingly, let's just forget that whole Declaration thing, shall we?

[jimbarry1946]

09:56 AM on 10/21/2011

Gee talk about sour grapes. It's 228 years since the war ended. We won.

[Leon Stark]

08:09 AM on 10/21/2011

Illegal under whose laws? If the British Crown was committing illegal and unjust acts upon their colonies, then anything that the colonies sought to do would be less so, since it came from the consent of the governed. Taxes inflicted on the Colonies that were not equally inflicted on the residents of the home-island made for anger on the rights of British Citizens in different Colonies and consistency of Governance. Acts of quartering on soldiers in the homes of simple colonists, without due compensation, was ruining businesses, farms and families, not the governance that makes for colonists loyalty to the Crown that put armed men on their property, in their barns and houses, taking over where "a man's home is his castle".

The illegality was against a corrupted Crown system and the Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration were reminded by Dr. Franklin, "We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."

A new system was needed, one that the Governed took control of their Government and took care of the needs and courtesies of the citizens. Of course it was illegal to a covetous,Crown system. It went on so long that businessmen saw that their rights were not being fairly considered, their goods and services absconded by the Crown, and their right to communicate with others who have similar problems curtailed, with charges of treason applied to such communication. Now the British have a stronger ally than the strength they had alone.

[arakuss]

07:00 AM on 10/21/2011

This has to be the stupidest debate ever. Of course it was illegal to declare independence and rebel. It started as a rebellion and flared into a war of independence. Everyone who signed the Declaration of Independence knew they could be tried as executed for treason against the crown.

[bear2right]

02:34 AM on 10/21/2011

Even if the Declaration of Independence was illegal, there was a war, we won, case closed.

[Brian Manning]

01:22 AM on 10/21/2011

This article got removed from AOL news. Hah.

[p---]

11:06 PM on 10/20/2011

for a second there i thought i was on the onion...

[joran111]

10:35 PM on 10/20/2011

Of course it was illegal to secede. Just like it was when the southern states tried it here. The difference was, the future US was able to make it stick, with help from the French and others.

[bear2right]

02:32 AM on 10/21/2011

There is nothing in the Constitution that explicitly prohibits secession. Here's an article you might enjoy:

http://jimostrowski.com/articles/secession.html

[Leadsled]

05:12 PM on 10/20/2011

Yep the UK lawyers are right. It was quite illegal to declare independence. "Foreign Policy muses, "In any case, wasn't breaking British laws kind of the point? Maybe next time we can debate the legality of colonizing other people's countries in the first place."" This statement seems to imply that the people declaring independence were the "other people" whose countries were colonized. No, they were the colonizers, the "other people" were too busy being genocided by the americans to object to a lack of representation in parliament.

[matthew browne]

12:30 PM on 10/26/2011

Actually at that time it was technically the British who were genociding the "other people". It wasn't until after the war that Americans were doing it....

[Leadsled]

01:50 PM on 10/26/2011

I said the colonists who were doing it, which is accurate. One of the major stress points leading to the rebellion was that the British parliament passed laws to prevent colonial expansion into indian territory to the west of the Appalachians. It was the colonists doing the genociding, against imperial policy.