California Lieutenant Governor and gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom called Attorney General Jeff Sessions an “outright racist” on Monday evening for saying that sheriffs are a “critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.”
“Reminder that our Attorney General is an outright racist who wants us all to acknowledge ‘Anglo-American heritage,’” tweeted Newsom, who is running to lead the “Resistance State.”
Sessions made his factually accurate remarks while addressing the National Sheriffs Association, pointing out from where the unique concept of a sheriff originated, as Breitbart News noted:
The concept of a “sheriff” dates back more than 1000 years to pre-Norman Conquest Anglo-Saxon England where the “shire reeve” (the origin of the term sheriff) was a representative the King who operated with great independence to do justice at the local level. The sheriff as the enforcement wing of a local court is a unique feature of the English common law tradition from which our own legal system almost entirely derives.
Only countries like the United States, who inherit their “common law” legal systems from that of England, keep the tradition of the sheriff alive. Consequentially, outside of the United Kingdom and America, there are sheriffs in the former British Colonies of Australia, Nigeria, Canada, South Africa, and even India, where the office survives as a ceremonial position of honor.
In America, sheriffs are uniquely prominent elected officials responsible for virtually all state and local courts’ enforcement and, outside of major cities, much of the policing.
Liberals and legacy media reporters, who were never offended when then-Senator Barack Obama and members of Obama’s administration spoke about America’s Anglo-American legal heritage, immediately lost their minds after Sessions’ remarks, claiming Sessions revealed his racial insensitivity and animus.
A Department of Justice spokesman, Ian Prior, had to explain to legacy media outlets like CNN that “Anglo-American” is another way of saying common law and is regularly used among those in the legal community.
“As most law students learn in the first week of their first year, Anglo-American law — also known as the common law — is a shared legal heritage between England and America. The sheriff is unique to that shared legal heritage. Before reporters sloppily imply nefarious meaning behind the term, we would suggest that they read any number of the Supreme Court opinions that use the term. Or they could simply put ‘Anglo-American law’ into Google,” Prior explained to outlets like CNN.
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