This symposium essay contends that the image of the common law drawn by the Supreme Court in the Confrontation Clause context is both distorted and incomplete. In particular, the Court and scholars defending originalist positions rely almost entirely on English sources in their reconstruction of the common law basis for the Confrontation Clause, thereby neglecting the diversity of American common laws from the time of the Founding, a diversity that has already been unearthed by a number of legal historians. By drawing on hitherto untapped sources to furnish a bottom-up reconstruction of how testimony was treated in local criminal courts within mid- to late-eighteenth-century New Jersey, this essay demonstrates that, in at least some jurisdictions, the originalist vision of common law did not apply. The common law cannot, therefore, furnish a univocal answer to questions about the original meaning of the Confrontation Clause.

中文翻译：

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普通法对抗

这篇专题论文认为，最高法院在对抗条款背景下所描绘的普通法形象既扭曲又不完整。特别是，法院和捍卫原旨主义立场的学者几乎完全依赖英国资源来重建对抗条款的普通法基础，从而忽视了自建国以来美国普通法的多样性，这种多样性已经被许多法律史学家发掘。通过利用迄今尚未开发的资料，对 18 世纪中后期新泽西州地方刑事法院如何处理证词进行自下而上的重建，本文表明，至少在某些司法管辖区，共同法律不适用。因此，普通法不能