Commentaries On The Laws Of England Quotes

The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state: but this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public: to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press: but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous, or illegal, he must take the consequence of his own temerity.

Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent should suffer. —Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1766)

In Magna Carta it is more than once insisted on as the principal bulwark of our liberties; but especially by chap. 29. that no freeman shall be hurt in either his person or property, “nisi per legale judicium parium suorum vel per legem terrae “ ["unless by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land"].

Of all the parts of a law the most effectual is the vindicatory. For it is but lost labor to say, “do this, or avoid that,” unless we also declare, “this shall be the consequence of your non-compliance.” We must therefore observe, that the main strength and force of a law consists in the penalty annexed to it. Herein is to be found the principal obligation of human laws. Legislators and their laws are said to compel and oblige; not that by any natural violence they so constrain a man, as to render it impossible for him to act otherwise than as they direct, which is the strict sense of obligation: but because, by declaring and exhibiting a penalty against offenders, they bring it to pass that no man can easily choose to transgress the law; since, by reason of the impending correction, compliance is in a high degree preferable to disobedience.

In a fascinating admission, the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade acknowledged that under another, separate common law rule, an unborn child has inheritance rights. (Roe v. Wade, page 162). What they failed to mention (for obvious reasons) was that the common law clearly says these inheritance rights exist from the moment of conception! (Blackstone, Commentaries on the Law of England ,Vol. 1, pg. 126 (1765)). Doesn’t it seem ironic—as well as exceedingly illogical—that an unborn child would have his property rights better protected from the moment of conception than his life?

America’s legal system was based on the Bible and on British common law principles that derived from the eternal and immutable Law of the Creator, articulated best in 1765 by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England

For a man’s house is his castle, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium [and each man’s home is his safest refuge].

William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England interpreted coverture as meaning that “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing. . . . A man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself.” Coverture

Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. —SIR WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, Commentaries on the Laws of England

When money is lent on a contract to receive … [there is] an increase by way of compensation for the use; which is generally called interest by those who think it lawful, and usury by those who do not. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765

Abolitionists declared their first major victory in 1772 with the Somerset case, which was popularly interpreted as outlawing slavery in England. In ruling on the case, Lord Mansfield consulted with the great legal theorist William Blackstone, whose four‐volume Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) was required reading for students of law in England and America and “ranked second only to the Bible as a literary and intellectual influence on the history of American institutions.” Blackstone's understanding of slavery was richly ambiguous. On the one hand, he argued that only a positive law sanctioning slavery could override the natural law of freedom. On the other hand, he suggested that in certain circumstances natural law could trump positive law. Although Lord Mansfield based his decision in the Somerset case primarily on the precedent of villeinage, arguing that slaves could not be treated worse than villeins and thus could not forcibly be removed from England, Blackstone nevertheless contributed to its antislavery interpretation. British lawyers defending the slave James Somerset relied on Blackstone to argue that slavery was contrary to natural law; and Lord Mansfield acknowledged this while ruling in their favor. Somewhat inadvertently, Lord Mansfield established a precedent for Blackstone's theory that slavery could be sanctioned only by positive law. According to the legal scholar Robert Cover, the Somerset decision “gave institutional recognition to antislavery morality.” It influenced the gradual abolition of America's northern states, including Vermont's Constitution of 1777 (the first constitution in history to outlaw slavery), and the Quock Walker case of 1783, which effectively ended slavery in Massachusetts. Blackstone's Commentaries, coupled with the Somerset decision, would contribute to the antislavery platforms and ideologies of the Liberty, Free‐Soil, and Republican parties.

Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) was the most famous legal treatise of its time. It was originally delivered as a series of lectures at Oxford, and its ambitious aim was to put forward a coherent and comprehensive account of a notoriously unruly subject, the law as it had evolved historically in England.

He studied by himself, starting with the eighteenth-century treatise on common law, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. “The more I read,” Lincoln wrote later, “the more intensely interested I became. Never in my whole life was my mind so thoroughly absorbed. I read until I devoured [the Commentaries].” When he finished Blackstone, Lincoln dug into other books. He became fixated on his studies. Lincoln the law student, a neighbor remembered, “would go day after day for weeks and sit under an oak tree on [a] hill . . . and read.” When the sun moved, the neighbor continued, Lincoln “moved round [the] tree to keep in [the] shade . . . [he] was so absorbed that people said he was crazy. Sometimes [he] did not notice people when he met them.” Years later, Lincoln advised a young man who was considering a legal career: If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already. It is but a small matter whether you read with any body or not. I did not read with any one. Get the books, and read and study them till, you understand them in their principal features; and that is the main thing. It is of no consequence to be in a large town while you are reading. I read at New-Salem, which never had three hundred people living in it. The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places. . . . Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.

The English law is less embarrassed with inconsistent resolutions and doubtful questions, than any other known system of the same extent and the same duration. I may instance in the civil law: the text whereof, as collected by Justinian and his agents, is extremely voluminous and diffuse; but the idle comments, obscure glosses, and jarring interpretations grafted thereupon by the learned jurists, are literally without number. And these glosses, which are mere private opinions of scholastic doctors (and not, like our books of reports, judicial determinations of the court) are all of authority sufficient to be vouched and relied on; which must needs breed great distraction and confusion in their tribunals.