Public administration in early America: sex and the law in Puritan Massachusetts

Abstract

When they arrived in the New World the English Puritans expected to pursue justice by using the Bible and discretionary justice. Because they left England, in part, as an escape from a contemporary Sodom and Gomorrah, it is ironical that the discovery of sexual license in the New World forced Puritan authorities to reconsider how they administered justice. It was, in fact, the ongoing sexual misdeeds of the colonists that forced the jettisoning of discretionary justice and the substitution for it of a system of justice administration with a legal code. In effect, this was the first public administration in English America, and it was established because of sexual misconduct.

Citation

Wells, M.V. (2002), "Public administration in early America: sex and the law in Puritan Massachusetts", Management Decision, Vol. 40 No. 6, pp. 596-602. https://doi.org/10.1108/00251740210433981