William Blackstone's lectures turned English law into a bestseller
In 1753 an Oxford lawyer with a stalled career began giving the first university lectures ever offered on English law. They made William Blackstone famous and led to his four-volume Commentaries on the Laws of England, a work that earned him a fortune and is still cited by the United States Supreme Court.
Blackstone was born in London in 1723, five months after his father, a Cheapside silk merchant, had died. The family was comfortably off, but its money dwindled, and after his mother's death in 1736 most of what remained went on debts. He kept his place at Charterhouse School as a poor scholar, nominated by the prime minister Robert Walpole, and became head of the school by 15. He loved Ovid and Virgil, won a silver medal for Latin verse on Milton, and went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1738 on a new scholarship.
At Oxford he was strong in Greek, mathematics and poetry, and his notes on Shakespeare later appeared in a 1781 edition of the plays. He switched to civil law, became a fellow of All Souls, and was called to the bar in 1746, but his legal practice was slow. Instead he threw himself into college finances as bursar, simplifying its tangled accounts and finishing the Codrington Library.
Giving up practice in 1753, he launched his lecture series on English law. It brought in 453 pounds and led to a published outline in 1756 that kept selling out. In 1759 he became the first Vinerian Professor of English Law. His renewed fame revived his career at the bar, and in 1761 he entered Parliament as a Tory for Hindon, a rotten borough. The first of the four volumes of the Commentaries appeared in 1765, and the whole work made him 14,000 pounds.
After several failed attempts he became a judge in 1770 and served on the Court of Common Pleas until his death in 1780. The Commentaries went through repeated editions and gave English legal training a scholarly respectability it had lacked. A later Vinerian professor doubted the United States would have adopted the common law so completely without them, and readers included John Adams, John Marshall and Abraham Lincoln.
Source: William Blackstone
