William Blackstone: life, ideas and books

Life

William Blackstone was born in London in 1723 and educated at Charterhouse School and Pembroke College, Oxford. He was admitted to the Middle Temple, was called to the bar in 1746 and became a fellow of All Souls College. In 1753 he began a pioneering series of lectures on English law at Oxford, and in 1758 he became the first Vinerian Professor of English Law.

He sat in Parliament as a Tory for Hindon from 1761 and for Westbury from 1768, and in 1770 he was appointed a judge, first on the Court of King's Bench and then on the Court of Common Pleas, where he served until his death in Wallingford in 1780.

Ideas

Blackstone's contribution was to present the English common law as an ordered, rational system rather than a heap of precedents. His Commentaries (1765-69) set out the law in four volumes: the rights of persons, the rights of things, private wrongs and public wrongs. He emphasised the sovereignty of Parliament, the liberty of the subject under the law and the protections of due process, and is often credited with the maxim that it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

Critics, including Jeremy Bentham and Alexis de Tocqueville, argued that his picture of English law was too flattering.

Major works

• An Analysis of the Laws of England (1756).
• A Discourse on the Study of the Law (1758).
• Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69).

Why conservatives read him

The Commentaries were the main law text of the American founding generation and influenced John Adams, John Marshall and James Wilson. Jurists who read the Constitution by its original meaning turn to Blackstone for the legal vocabulary of the founders, including property, jury trial and the rights of the accused. He remains cited in American courts and is a foundation of the common-law tradition.