… is from John Phillip Reid‘s excellent 1993 essay “The Jurisprudence of Liberty: The Ancient Constitution in the Legal Historiography of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” which is chapter 4 of the 1993 collection The Roots of Liberty (Ellis Sandoz, ed.); this quotation appears on page 189 of the original edition of this volume:
The threat of sovereign discretion was not an American fear alone in the last half of the eighteenth century. A surprisingly large number of people in the mother country were apprehensive that the old safety of customary liberty was fast losing ground to the capricious rationality of law by legislative command.
