Even elderly readers of the New Rambler may have forgotten the burst of scholarly attention that was paid to William Blackstone’s famous Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) in the 1970s and early 1980s.  A part of it may be explained by the coincidence of those years with the two hundredth anniversary of Blackstone’s death in 1780, but historical scholarship on the Commentaries has also had a continuous history.  These two decades simply witnessed a special outpouring of that interest.  In 1973 Gareth Jones published a selection from the Commentaries, one which he called The Sovereignty of the Law (1973).  In 1979, the University of Chicago Press brought out a facsimile copy of the 1st edition.  Each of its four volumes was coupled with an introduction by one of the leading legal historians of the day (Stanley Katz, A.W. Brian Simpson, John Langbein, and Thomas Green), all of them qualified to assess Blackstone’s contribution to the development of the common law.  Then, only three years later, Professional Books published a facsimile version of the 15th edition of the Commentaries,

Law review articles devoted to Blackstone’s work were also plentiful in those years.  Most authors praised it.  Some did the reverse.  Among the latter, probably the best known at the time was written by a young professor at Harvard Law School, Duncan Kennedy.  His ambitious if meandering essay sought to demonstrate that Blackstone was “engaged in a futile and indeed a wrongheaded enterprise.”  In Kennedy’s reading of the Commentaries, the author’s primary object had been to persuade readers to take the merits of English law at face value and so to “mystify” those who were being oppressed by its application.  Blackstone’s intent was to show that the chains which bound the oppressed were reasonable, indeed beneficial overall[1].  Kennedy’s article was published in the heyday of Critical Legal Studies, and Blackstone’s Commentaries made a good target.  That he chose Blackstone as the representative of an existing system of repressive law underlines the importance still ascribed to a series of lectures delivered two centuries before.

This period of special interest might have been expected, although Blackstone’s work has never been consigned to the dustbin of outdated legal doctrine.  Certainly none of the criticism the work has drawn has ever affected its commercial success.  From the start, the clarity and utility of the Commentaries established the author’s fame and filled his pockets.  His work became particularly famous in the United States.  Before the establishment of American law schools, Blackstone’s Commentaries served as the most common source of literary instruction for young men seeking to become lawyers.  Abraham Lincoln is said to have told a friend that he had “never read anything which so profoundly interested and thrilled me” as did Blackstone’s work.  Generations of young men who were repelled by the principal alternative – the crabbed learning found in Sir Edward Coke’s commentary on Littleton’s Tenures – turned with joy and relief to this alternative.  Even today, it is a source of praise for a sitting American judge that he requires his law clerks to become familiar with Blackstone’s Commentaries[2].  Critics have long pointed out that Blackstone’s lectures were too elementary to be useful to most practicing lawyers; they were meant for young gentlemen who had no intention of making a career in law, but might need to know something about the law in their own lives.  That may be so, but whatever its limitations, the clarity of Blackstone’s prose, together its importance in having brought the study of the common law within the purview of the subjects taught at a university have long sparked interest in the Commentaries.  The interest that began in 1970s only intensified a long-established pattern. 

This year – more than a generation after the 1980s – another scholarly effort drawing attention to Blackstone’s Commentaries has appeared.  It is a new edition.  Organized by an Australian, Wilfrid Prest, also the author of a fine biography, William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century (2008), this new venture includes introductory essays by four others – a fellow Australian, and two from the United States and one from England (David Lemmings, Simon Stern, Tom Gallanis, and Ruth Paley).  Each of them has contributed an introduction explaining something of the contents, adding their own assessments, and describing the contemporary reaction to their section of the Commentaries.  Most significantly, they have also sought to provide an improved text and to stir up interest among twenty-first century readers in their subject.  Whether the latter succeeds is a relevant question.  The four volume set comes at a price that does not seem as exorbitant as it would have forty years ago ($195 hardback; $95 paperback), and together its volumes do make a handsome set.  Even so, serviceable editions of Blackstone’s Commentaries are not scarce, and the resources at the disposal even of relatively prosperous law schools are coming under financial pressure.  Is this new set worth buying?  Is it worth reading? 

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