William Blackstone in the United States

Life and Work of Sir William Blackstone

The following is a description of Blackstone [1]:

Born July 10, 1723. In 1736 he entered Pembroke College, Oxford, where he continued till 1741, when he began to study law. In 1746, at the end of the probationary period, he was called to the bar. Down to 1760 he seems to have been engaged in but two cases of importance. He passed much time in Oxford, taking an active interest in the affairs of the university. About 1750 he began to plan his Lectures on the Laws of England. In 1753 he delivered his first course at Oxford. The next year he published his Analysis of the Laws of England, for the use of his numerous hearers. This analysis is founded on a similar work by Sir Matthew Hale. A “broadsheet,” dated Oxford, June 23, 1753, announcing that the “course of lectures” would begin “in Michaelmas Term next” (November), and were “calculated” for laymen as well as for lawyers, stated that “To this End it is proposed to lay down a general and comprehensive Plan of the Laws of England; to deduce their History; to enforce and illustrate their leading Rules and fundamental Principles; and to compare them with the Laws of Nature and of other Nations; without entering into practical Niceties, or the minute Distinctions of particular Cases.”

Mr. Viner, having bequeathed to the University of Oxford a sum of money and the copyright of his Abridgment of Law, for the purpose of instituting a professorship of common law, Blackstone, on October 20, 1758, was elected first Vinerian professor, and, five days later, delivered his “Introductory Lecture on the Study of Law,” afterward prefixed to his Commentaries. His lectures became celebrated throughout the kingdom. He never acquired celebrity as an advocate. In Tonson v. Collins (1 W. Bl. 301, 321), he made an exhaustive argument in favor of the common-law right of literary property. In 1765 appeared the first volume of his commentaries. The other three volumes were published during the next four years. In 1766 he resigned the Vinerian professorship. In 1770 he was appointed a judge of the King’s Bench, receiving then the honor of knighthood; and, a few months later, became a judge of the court of Common Pleas. In Scott v. Shephard (2 W. Bl. 892), the ” squib case,” wherein the difference between the actions of trespass and,case was discussed, he dissented from the opinion ot the majority of the court. See Case, 3.

He died February 14, 1780. The notes of decisions which he had collected, and prepared for the press, were published In two volumes, in 1781, as directed in his will, by his brother-in-law, James Clitherow, Esq. American lawyers, with few exceptions, since the Revolution, have drawn their first lessons in jurisprudence from Blackstone’s Commentaries. That work was contemporaneous with our Constitution, and brought the law of England down to that day, and then, as now, was the authoritative text-book on its subject, familiar not only to the profession, but to all men of the general education of the founders of our Constitution.

Blackstone first resdued the law of England from chaos. He did well what Coke tried to do one hundred and fifty years before; he gave an account of the law as a whole, capable of being studied, not only without disgust, but with interest and profit. His arrangement of the subject may be defective; but a better work of the kind has not yet been written, and, with all its defects, the literary skill with which a problem of extraordinary difficulty was dealt with is astonishing. He knew nearly everything, relating to the subject, worth knowing. ” Its institutional value, and especially its historic value as an authentic and faithful mirror of the condition of the English Law as the result of legislation and adjudication, as it then existed, it is difficult to overestimate.”

Influence of Blackstone

According to the Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, the “influence of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, first published at Oxford between 1765 and 1769, was pervasive in American jurisprudence for much of the nineteenth century.”

Resources

Notes and References

1. Concept of Blackstone provided by the Anderson Dictionary of Law (1889) (Dictionary of Law consisting of Judicial Definitions and Explanations of Words, Phrases and Maxims and an Exposition of the Principles of Law: Comprising a Dictionary and Compendium of American and English Jurisprudence; William C. Anderson; T. H. Flood and Company, Law Publishers, Chicago, United States)