I presented a paper, Transforming
the Common Law: Criminal Law Reform in Early Massachusetts Bay,” at the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association held in New Orleans. This paper is an overview of my dissertation and argues that the Puritans in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts Bay Colony were actually far more lenient than their contemporary Englishmen. An illustration of this is the end of the 'Bloody Code,' or capital punishment for property crimes, starting at the founding of the colony. Although banishment and capital punishment were used in the colony they were an outlier with the most common punishments being fines and shamming (pillory, reading of name at town meetings, admonishments). A previous version of this paper was presented a the Early Modern Workshop of the University of Chicago.
