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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
BLACKSTONE'S Commentaries on the Laws of England was on its appearance received with unbounded admiration. It was felt to be a work of untold originality. The author became at once the Great Commentator. In the eyes of his earliest readers he was not only an erudite lawyer and a charming writer, but also a profound jurist. The Annual Register for 1767—then edited by Burke—contained a lengthy eulogy of the book. The review may well have been written by Burke himself.
1 Written in 1909.
2 Written in 1909.
3 Lincoln and many of his friends and contemporaries received much intellectual training from the study of legal writers such as Blackstone, and from the constant discussion of the pre-eminently legal and constitutional questions raised by the inevitable conflict between North and South. The effect and the solidity of this education in law and politics has been underrated in Europe.
4 The Teaching of English Law at Universities, by James Bradley Thayer LL. D., Weld Professor of Law at Harvard (1895), pp. 4, 5. From this pamphlet, which ought to be far better known in England than it is, my statements as to the influence of Blackstone in America are mainly taken; it is, however, past a doubt.
5 Written in 1909.
6 With a knowledge not possessed by his contemporaries, Mr. Westlake in 1858 applied doctrines gathered from Savigny, and other German authorities, to the elucidation of the conflict of laws, and thereby gave in several respects a new turn to the judicial development in England of that branch of the law.
7 Written in 1909.
8 Recently retired.
9 At that date—1909—Corpus Proffessor of Jurisprudence, Oxford. He died in 1925.
10 The first edition of Vols. II and III was published in 1909.
11 Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence, Oxford, 1883–1903.
The substance of this article was delivered as a Public Lecture on Blackstone's Commentaries on Saturday, June 12, 1909, at All Souls College, Oxford.
