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- Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book the First
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Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book the First
Chapters
29 total*Transcriber's Notes:* Sir William Blackstone's *Commentaries on the Laws of England* was first published in 1765-1769. It contains a number of archaic spellings (including "goaler" for "gaoler" and "it's" for "its") that have been preserved as they appear in the original. All such spellings have been verified using the Oxford English Dictionary. Inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, capitalization, and italicization have also been preserved. Obvious printer errors have been preserved and marked with red dotted underlining. Hover the mouse over the underlined text to view a Transcriber's Note. Errata in the original are hyperlinked to the Errata section.
COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND. - BOOK THE FIRST. - BY WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, Esq. VINERIAN PROFESSOR OF LAW, AND SOLICITOR GENERAL TO HER MAJESTY.
PREFACE.
ERRATA.
INTRODUCTION.
Of the Rights of Persons.
COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND.
INTRODUCTION. - Section the first. On the STUDY of the LAW.\[A\]
Section the second. Of the NATURE of LAWS in general.
Section the third. Of the LAWS of ENGLAND.
Description
In this landmark work the author turns his Oxford lecture series into a systematic guide to the laws and constitution of England as they stood in the mid‑eighteenth century. Written with a blend of scholarly rigor and a practical eye for the courtroom, it brings together statutes, royal prerogatives, and the customs that shaped daily justice. The preface reveals the author's ambition to make the law a liberal science, supported by the new Vinerian chair that helped institutionalise legal education.
Readers will notice the faithful preservation of original spelling, punctuation and even printer's errors, each annotated by careful transcriber’s notes that explain the quirks of an 18th‑century press. At the same time, archaic long s and obsolete quotation conventions have been modernised, so the narrative flows smoothly for contemporary ears. Because the commentary stops short of later judicial developments, it offers a vivid snapshot of how English law was taught and understood before the revolutionary reforms of the nineteenth century.
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Language
en
Duration
~17 hours (1012K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Produced by The Bookworm, Linda Cantoni, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Posner Memorial Collection (http://posner.library.cmu.edu/Posner/))
Release date
2009-12-30
Rights
Public domain in the USA.
About the author
Sir William Blackstone
1723–1780
Best known for the hugely influential Commentaries on the Laws of England, this 18th-century jurist helped turn English common law into something students and readers could grasp. His writing shaped legal education in Britain and America for generations.
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