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Definition: Blackstone, William from The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide

English jurist who wrote to defend the common law of England as a natural and coherent system, and published his Commentaries on the Laws of England 1765–70. A barrister from 1746, he became the first professor of English Law at Oxford 1758, and a justice of the Court of Common Pleas 1770. Knighted 1770.

quotations

Blackstone, William

Blackstone, Sir William

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
1723–80, English jurist. At first unsuccessful in legal practice, he turned to scholarship and teaching. He became (1758) the first Vinerian professor of law at Oxford, where he inaugurated courses in English law. British universities had previously confined themselves to the study of Roman law. Blackstone published his lectures as Commentaries on the Laws of England (4 vol., 1765–69), a work that reduced to order and lucidity the formless bulk of English law. It ranks with the achievements of Sir Edward Coke and Sir Matthew Hale, Blackstone's great predecessors. Blackstone's Commentaries , written in an urbane, dignified, and clear style, is regarded as the most thorough treatment of the whole of English law ever produced by one man. It demonstrated that English law as a system of justice was comparable to Roman law and the civil law of the Continent. Blackstone has been criticized, notably by Jeremy Bentham, for a complacent belief that, in the main, English law was beyond…
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Full text Article Blackstone, William

From Encyclopedia of Emancipation and Abolition in the Transatlantic World
Sir William Blackstone was an English jurist, professor of common law at Oxford University, and author of Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), the first comprehensive treatise on English law and the English Constitution. His writings on slavery reflect the extent to which Enlightenment…
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William Blackstone (The Library of Congress)
Sir William Blackstone is recognized as one of the great legal commentators of English law, whose work helped shape the foundations of U.S. criminal and civil law. Blackstone, a British legal scholar, published his major works in the years just preceding the American Revolution. These works have…
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Full text Article William Blackstone (1723–1780)

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
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Full text Article Blackstone

From Merriam-Webster's Collegiate(R) Dictionary Full text Article Biographical Names
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Full text Article JUSTICE AND INJUSTICE

From Collins Dictionary of Quotations
The price of justice is eternal publicity. BENNETT, Arnold Things That Have Interested Me . [Discussing the rising costs of going to law] We cannot for ever be content to acknowledge that in England justice is open to all – like the Ritz Hotel. BINGHAM, Sir Thomas Independent on Sunday , 1994. …
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© LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS...
Born in 1723, the third but posthumous son of a financially troubled silk-draper and a mother who died before he reached adolescence, the orphaned William Blackstone attended London's prestigious Charterhouse School as a scholarship boy. An academic prodigy, he entered Oxford University at the age…
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Full text Article MARRIAGE

From Collins Dictionary of Quotations
Tomorrow our marriage will be 21 years old! How many a storm has swept over it and still it continues green and fresh and throws out vigorous roots. [Attr.] It was partially my fault that we got divorced ... I tended to place my wife under a pedestal. [At a nightclub in Chicago, 1964] To marry a man…
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As a literary and legal form, charters represent an important phase of the colonial experience. The tradition of the American charter emerged from royal charters and letters of patent, which granted representatives of the Crown the right to claim foreign territory. The original royal charters were…
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The most significant moral and political philosopher of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe, Pufendorf was, after Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), the main representative of the ‘modern’ theory of natural law. Despite the general oblivion into which they eventually fell, his works had an…
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Full text Article Blackstone, Sir William

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
(born July 10, 1723, London, Eng.—died Feb. 14, 1780, Wallingford, Oxfordshire) British jurist. Orphaned at age 12, he was educated at public school and later at Pembroke College, Oxford, at the expense of his uncle, a London surgeon. He was elected a fellow of All Souls College in 1744, and in 1746…
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