A political and legal theorist as well as a belletristic writer, John Mercer was born in Dublin, the namesake of his Anglo-Irish merchant father. Mercer claimed to have attended Trinity College, but since records do not show a graduation date, he apparently never completed a degree. He came to Virginia in 1720 and read his way into a legal profession; in Stafford County he built Marlborough, one of the most elaborate and original houses in colonial America.

For more than forty years, Mercer was a prominent and vocal attorney, who sustained a series of reprimands and reinstatements to the bar. Yet his abridgment of Virginia laws, modeled after Edmund Wingate's abridgment of English statutes (1655), was indispensable to court justices soon after its publication in 1737. The first digested code printed in Virginia, the work made the laws as intelligible as possible and included punishments and fines for public and private...