[adrianba]

At the founding, the Constitution documented all the things that were going to be different, but courts were intended to continue to apply the rest of the common law as it was. So, it's less about being beholden to England's legal history as much as it is being beholden to American history as it was at the time. It's just that most of the legal writing that courts depended upon was published by English legal scholars.

One of the downsides of the fixed written Constitution being hard to change is that you end up with these strange rules where the law today is dependent upon intuition about how a current problem would have been viewed through the lens of the common law at the time of the founding, and we mostly only have English legal treatises to fall back on, so it feels like being beholden to English legal history.