Sir William Blackstone

Life and ideas

William Blackstone was an English barrister who became the first Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford, where from 1753 he gave the first university lectures on English law. They became the four volumes of his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), which describe the rights of persons, the rights of things, private wrongs and public wrongs in an orderly, readable form for educated people and not just for lawyers. He held that human law rests on the law of nature, and he praised the common law and the English constitution. The Commentaries sold widely in Britain and America, where they were the main legal textbook for decades and were read by the founders and by generations of lawyers who learned their law from them. Critics, notably Bentham, attacked his complacent defence of the existing law.