William Blackstone

Accomplished legal scholar and jurist William Blackstone (b. 1723–d. 1780) is known for his remarkable work, the Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769). Born in London, Blackstone won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Oxford, and subsequently studied the common law in London before being called to the bar at Middle Temple in 1746. In 1758, he was elected as the first Vinerian Chair in English Law at Oxford, a position he held until 1766. As Vinerian Professor, Blackstone delivered the first lectures on English common law in any university in the world. In 1765 he published the first volume of his Oxford lectures, eventually producing four volumes of the Commentaries. During his career, Blackstone published many other works, and a collection of his nominate reports was published shortly after his death. The Commentaries, however, were his crowning achievement. This seminal work synthesized the writings of generations of judges, legal treatise writers, Parliamentary legislation, and political theories, making England’s common law accessible to students of the law. After an introduction that addressed the study of law and the nature of laws in general as well as in England and its subject countries, the volumes explored the rights of persons; the rights of things; private wrongs, meaning offenses against individuals; and public wrongs, or criminal law. The Commentaries ran through eight English editions in his lifetime, and in America, it sold more than one thousand copies before an edition was printed in America in 1771–1772. In the absence of American legal treatises and home-grown precedent, late-18th and early-19th-century law students and practitioners turned to the Commentaries as a central reference on the common law. Contemporary critics, most notably Jeremy Bentham, described Blackstone’s work as a chaotic and superficial attempt to preserve the common law, which he considered to be a confusing and outdated legal system. His supporters praised his ability to distill the complicated layers of English law into four volumes that constituted a systematic description of common law. In 1770 he was appointed a judge in the Court of Common Pleas, where he served until his death in 1780, at the age of fifty-six. Blackstone’s ideas about Anglo-American common law are still relevant today, as can be seen through the continued interest of scholars and law practitioners into the 21st century.