BLACKSTONE, SIR WILLIAM the most famous of English jurists, was born in Cheapside on July io, 1723, the posthumous son of Charles Blackstone, silkman, citizen and bowyer, of London. From Charterhouse school he went at the age of to Pembroke colleEe. Oxford. and was entered at the Middle Temple in 1741. He was elected in 1744 a fellow of All Souls, devoted himself ardently to the interests of the college, became bursar and prepared his Essay on Collateral Consanguinity to defeat the claims of people who were of any degree of kin to the founder, to fellowships, claims which threatened to lower the prestige and efficiency of the foundation of Archbishop Chichele. Called to the bar in 1746, he was chosen by the ancient borough of Wallingford as its recorder in '749. He tried to practise at the bar during this period, but with so little success that in 1753 he was minded to quit London altogether and devote himself to an academic life. In Michaelmas term 1753 he began to read law lectures at Oxford. His hearers were captivated by the lucidity and charm of his style and by the simplicity with which he pre sented the subject, slurring over the difficulties and contrarieties of the law, giving the whole subject an air of completeness and mutual interdependence as if it were a uniform logical system, suppressing or ignoring the archaic learning, and putting forward the English law as the embodiment of i8th century wisdom.
But from the first he antagonized his rival for the position of the greatest English jurist, Bentham, who seemed to dislike him as much as a man as he mistrusted him as a teacher. Bentham wrote of him that he was "a formal, precise and affected lec turer, just what you would expect from the character of his writings, cold, reserved and wary, exlaibiting a frigid pride"; he, however, qualified to some extent this mordant censure when he also wrote :—"correct, elegant, unembarrassed, the style is such as could scarce fail to recommend a work still more vicious in point of matter to the multitude of readers. He it is, in short, who, first of all institutional writers, has taught jurisprudence to speak the language of the scholar and the gentleman." In 1758 the lectures were first delivered in their present form. Blackstone having been elected to the newly-founded Vinerian professorship, delivered the introductory lecture "On the Study of the Law" which is prefixed to the first volume of the Commentaries. It was some years before the author decided to present the Commen taries as a finished work; but notes of the lectures were in circu lation, so in Nov. 1765 the first volume appeared, and the three remaining parts were published in the four succeeding years.
On May 5, 176i, he had married Sarah, daughter of James Clitherow of Boston House, Middlesex; on July 28 in the same year the earl of Westmorland, the chancellor of the university, made him principal of New Inn hall.
Professional advancement came side by side with academic. On May 6, 1761, the very day after his marriage, he received a patent of precedence giving him the rank of king's counsel. In 1763 he was made solicitor-general to the queen, the first to hold that office under Queen Charlotte, to whom he dedicated the Commen taries; and about the same time he became a bencher of the Middle Temple where his well-known portrait by Gainsborough hangs. In that year his success at the bar led him to resign the professorship and the headship of New Inn hall, two positions which he is said by his anonymous biographer to have intended to use for the foundation of a law school. His career in parliament, to which he was elected for Hindon first 0760, afterwards for Westbury, was somewhat inglorious. He took the ministerial side in the controversy about the Middlesex election, and drew a severe criticism from Junius who boasted that he had answered "Dr. Blackstone" out of his own Commentaries, and seems to have completely silenced him.
Blackstone disliked attendance in parliament ; this aversion, no doubt, determined him to refuse the solicitor-generalship in 177o and in February of the same year to accept a judgeship in the court of common pleas. In the ten years of his judgeship he ad ministered the law satisfactorily but attained no special dis tinction, and his career is not associated with any famous trial. He seems to have given signs of rather premature decay towards i78o, attributed to his sedentary habits and avoidance of physical exercise, and on Feb. 14 of that year he died in London. Two volumes of his Reports of Decided Cases, with a brief memoir by his brother-in-law James Clitherow, appeared in 1781, but added little to his fame either as reporter or judge; the reports of his nephew Henry Blackstone are thought better of by the profession.
Blackstone was by no means a scientific jurist. He has only the vaguest possible grasp of the elementary conceptions of law. He evidently regards the law of gravitation, the law of nature, and the law of England, as different examples of the same principle—as rules of action or conduct imposed by a superior power on its subjects. He propounds in terms the doctrine that municipal or positive laws derive their validity from their conformity to the so-called law of nature or law of God. "No human laws," he says, "are of any validity if contrary to this." His distinction between rights of persons and rights of things, implying, as it would appear, that things as well as persons have rights, is attributable to a misunderstanding of the technical terms of the Roman law. In distinguishing between private and public wrongs (civil injuries and crimes) he fails to seize the true principle of the division. Austin, who accused him of following slavishly the method of Hale's Analysis of the Law, declares that he "blindly adopts the mistakes of his rude and compendious model; missing invariably, with a nice and surprising infelicity, the pregnant but obscure suggestions which it proffered to his attention, and which would have guided a discerning and inventive writer to an arrangement comparatively just." By the want of precise and closely-defined terms, and his tendency to substitute loose literary phrases, he falls occasionally into irreconcilable contradictions. Even in dis cussing a subject of such immense importance as equity, he hardly takes pains to discriminate between the legal and popular senses of the word, and, from the small place which equity jurisprudence occupies in his arrangement, he would scarcely seem to have realized its true position in the law of England. Subject, however, to these strictures, the completeness of the treatise, its serviceable if not scientific order, and the power of lucid exposition possessed by the author demand emphatic recognition. Blackstone's defects as a jurist are more conspicuous in hip treatment of the under lying principles and fundamental divisions of the law than in his account of its substantive principles.
Blackstone by no means confined himself to the work of a legal commentator. It is his business, especially when he touches on the framework of society, to find a basis in history and reason for all the most characteristic English institutions. There is not much either of philosophy or fairness in this part of his work. Whether through the natural conservatism of a lawyer, or through his own timidity and subserviency as a man and a politician, he is always found to be a specious defender of the existing order of things. More undeniable than the political fairness of the treatise is its merits as a work of literature. It is written in a most graceful and attractive style, and although no opportunity of embellish ment has been lost, the language is always simple and clear. Whether it is owing to its literary graces, or to its success in flattering the prejudices of the public to which it was addressed, the influence of the book in England has been extraordinary. Not lawyers only, and lawyers perhaps even less than others, accepted it is an authoritative revelation of the law. It performed for educated society in England much the same service as was ren dered to the people of Rome by the publication of their previously unknown laws. It is more correct to regard it as a handbook of the law for laymen than as a legal treatise ; and as the first and only book of the kind in England it has been received with some what indiscriminating reverence. To this day Blackstone's criti cism of the English constitution probably expresses the most profound political convictions of the majority of the English people.
Although Blackstone has been much criticized for his super ficiality and lack of the historical sense he showed signs of the recognition of the duty of research. His two volumes of Law Tracts (1762) give a better impression of him as a student than the more eloquent Commentaries and seem to be the outcome of deeper learning and thought. But his inability to place himself in the position of legislators of remote times and his habit of justi fying everything as reasonable come out very markedly in his treatment of the famous rule of the bastard eigne and mulier puisne. In the Commentaries themselves his account of the Revolution of 1688 exhibits these defects in the most pronounced form, as in his optimistic description of Edward VI. as an amiable prince, in "the short sunshine" of whose reign England enjoyed a peculiar felicity. And his shallowness appears in his justification of the penal laws or apology for them. Instead of condemning them he says : "these laws are seldom exerted in their utmost rigour and indeed if they were it would be very difficult to excuse them." He did, however, go so far as to say in his first edition that he was not sure that some of the secretaries did not hold principles which made them as dangerous as the papists them selves, but in deference to an outbreak of indignation from the secretaries he softened or got rid of this expression in subsequent editions.
In the English law institutional writers are not recognized. The most famous and approved treatises have no such rank as is accorded for instance in Scotland to the works of Stair, of Bell and the like. Consequently BIackstone is seldom or never referred to as an authority. His Commentaries are recommended for their literary value, and they have experienced the singular fate of being used as the framework upon which all the additions made to the law by statutes or decisions since his day have been attached for the use of students preparing for examinations, his original text being printed with the new matter interpolated in successive layers, producing in the result text books swollen out of all proportion into portents of ugliness. These monstrosities now, happily, are failing to attract as of old. And there is a reaction in favour of regarding Blackstone's great work from the standpoint of true historical and literary criticism as a complete work of art of the greatest literary merit, inadequate in deep learning, unscientific in arrangement, often mistaken in very elementary matters, but a genuine outcome of i8th century culture and a true exposition of the i8th century standpoint. This reaction is really the just tribute to Blackstone's greatness.
But the fame of Blackstone is greater in the United States than it is in his native land, and bids fair to continue to be, and justly so. After the Declaration of Independence and indeed before, the Commentaries were the chief, and in many parts of the country almost the only, source of the knowledge of English law for the great commonwealth of the West. A book which in the old country was and is a text book became in the new an oracle of law, until as years went on the great students of the law in the United States began those deeper studies which have added such wonderful stores of learning and thought to legal literature. But the great ness of Blackstone's renown through two English-speaking conti nents was most clearly revealed in July 1924, on the memorable joint visit of the American and Canadian law associations to Eng land, when the American lawyers presented to the law courts of London a statue of Blackstone to be executed in marble. The aim of the gift was declared to be "to mark the influence which the great commentator had had over American jurisprudence." It was only the giant plaster model which was unveiled in 1924. The marble itself, the work of Paul Bartlett, who did not live to see the statue in its final perfection, it being finished by the sculptor's wife, was placed in its position in June 1928, in the great hall of the royal courts of justice.