Sir William Blackstone - Blackstone and Property Jurisprudence, Blackstone and anti-Catholicism, Trivia

Jurist, born in London, UK. He studied at Oxford, and in 1746 was called to the bar. He became the first holder of the Vinerian chair of common law at Oxford (1758), where he delivered the first lectures in English law ever given in a university. MP for Hindon, Wiltshire (1761–70), and Principal of New Inn Hall, Oxford, he was made solicitor general to the Queen (1763) and a judge of the Court of Common Pleas (1770–80). From 1765 to 1769 he published his celebrated Commentaries on the Laws of England, based on his lectures, which became the most influential and comprehensive exposition of English law.

Sir William Blackstone (July 10, 1723 – February 14, 1780) was an English jurist and professor who produced the historical and analytic treatise on the common law called Commentaries on the Laws of England, first published in four volumes over 1765–1769. It had an extraordinary success, said to have brought the author £14,000, and still remains an important source on classical views of the common law and its principles.

Blackstone was born in Cheapside in 1732, the posthumous son of a London silk mercer. After practising in the courts of Westminster for several years, without great success, he returned to Oxford in 1758 when another lawyer, Charles Viner, established an endowed chair at the university for a lecturer in law. Blackstone lived at Castle Priory in Wallingford, and is buried at St Peter's Church in the town.

In addition to the Commentaries, Blackstone published treatises on Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forests.

Blackstone and his work occasionally appear in literature. For example, Blackstone receives mention in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. A bust of Blackstone is a typical ornament of a lawyer's office in early Perry Mason novels, and in Anatomy of a Murder. Blackstone's Commentaries are also mentioned in Charles Portis's comic novel, The Dog of the South.

Blackstone wrote his books on common law shortly before the United States Constitution was written. The terms and phrases used by the framers often derived from Blackstone's works.

US courts frequently quote Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England as the definitive pre-Revolutionary War source of common law; in particular, the United States Supreme Court quotes from Blackstone's work whenever they wish to engage in historical discussion that goes back that far, or further (for example, when discussing the intent of the Framers of the Constitution). US and other common law courts mention with strong approval Blackstone's formulation also known as Blackstone's ratio popularly stated as "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" -- although he did not first express the principle.

Blackstone's work was more often synthetic than orginal, but his writing was organized, clear, and dignified, which brings his great work within the category of general literature.

Blackstone and Property Jurisprudence

Blackstone's characterization of property rights as "sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe," has often been quoted in judicial opinions and secondary legal literature as the dominant Western concept of property.

Blackstone and anti-Catholicism

William Blackstone shared the general Anti-Catholic prejudices of his age and millieu. *54

Trivia

Blackstone's grandson William Seymour Blackstone was an MP for Wallingford.

A statue honoring Blackstone is located on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. Another one exists in the library of All Souls College, Oxford, where Blackstone was a fellow.