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Blackstone's Science of Legislation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Extract

In 1795, Dugald Stewart, the professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and reigning Athenian of the North, observed in a famous estimate of the career of Adam Smith that “the most celebrated works produced in the different countries of Europe during the last thirty years” had “aimed at the improvement of society” by “enlightening the policy of actual legislators.” Among such celebrated productions Stewart included the publications of François Quesnay, Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, Pedro Campomanes, and Cesare Beccaria and, above all, the writings of Smith himself, whose Wealth of Nations “unquestionably” represented “the most comprehensive and perfect work that has yet appeared on the general principles of any branch of legislation.” One of the more striking achievements of recent scholarship on eighteenth-century social thought has been to make sense of this description of Smith's Inquiry and to enable us better to appreciate why Smith chose to describe his system of political economy as a contribution to the “science of a legislator.” In a cultural setting in which, as J. G. A. Pocock has put it, “jurisprudence” was “the social science of the eighteenth century,” law and legislation further featured, in J. H. Burns's formula, as “the great applied science among the sciences of man.” Moralists and jurists of the period, echoing earlier political conventions, may readily have acknowledged with Rousseau that “it would take gods to give men laws.” Nevertheless, even in Rousseau's program for perfecting “the conditions of civil association”—“men being taken as they are and laws as they might be”—a mortal “legislator” appeared plainly “necessary.”

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Research Article
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1988

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References

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26 Comm., 3:196.

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34 Comm. (n. 13 above), 1:38.

35 Ibid., pp. 39–40.

36 Ibid., p. 41.

37 Ibid., p. 44.

38 Ibid., p. 41.

39 Ibid., 2:2.

40 For the argument that Blackstone's natural law doctrines are contradicted by his account of parliamentary sovereignty, see Pollock, Frederick, “A Plea for Historical Interpretation,” Law Quarterly Review 39 (1923): 165Google Scholar; Allen, C. K., Law in the Making, 5th ed. (London, 1951), pp. 427–28Google Scholar; Barker, Ernest, Essays on Government, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1951), p. 129Google Scholar; Dicey, A. V., Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, 9th ed. (London, 1939), pp. 41–42, 64Google Scholar. For the general claim that natural law theory was relatively unimportant to the Commentaries, see Barker, Ernest, Traditions of Civility (Cambridge, 1948), pp. 308–12Google Scholar. These issues receive more sympathetic treatment in Finnis, John N., “Blackstone's Theoretical Intentions,” Natural Law Forum 12 (1967): 163–83Google Scholar, Stourzh, Gerald, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford, Calif., 1970), pp. 922, and Lobban (n. 27 above)Google Scholar.

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42 Ibid., p. 123.

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44 Ibid., p. 145.

45 Ibid., p. 67.

46 Ibid., pp. 64–67, and see 4:408–14.

47 See Comm. (n. 13 above), vol. 4, chap. 33, where Blackstone offered a summary of English legal history. The novelty and sophistication of Blackstone's legal history has been recently canvassed in an important study by Willman, Robert, “Blackstone and the [Theoretical Perfection] of English Law in the Reign of Charles II,” Historical Journal 26 (1983): 3970Google Scholar, though since challenged in parts by Cairns, John W., “Blackstone, the Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law,” Historical Journal 28 (1985): 711–17Google Scholar.

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54 Comm., 1:67, 2:11.

55 See, e.g., his discussion of copyholds, ibid., 2:147–50.

56 Ibid., 4:409.

57 Ibid., p. 442.

58 Ibid., 1:64.

59 Ibid., 1:69–71. The structure of this conception of common law as received customary practice is explored by Simpson, A. W. B. in “The Common Law and Legal Theory,” in Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, ed. Simpson, , 2d ser. (Oxford, 1973)Google Scholar; and by Postema, Gerald J. in Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (Oxford, 1986), pp. 338Google Scholar. I am much indebted to these two important discussions.

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66 Ibid., pp. 267–68. See also 2:288–89 and 3:329, where Blackstone again emphasized the need for law to accommodate swift property exchange in a commercial society.

67 Ibid., 1:160.

68 Bentham, , A Fragment on Government (n. 15 above), p. 480Google Scholar. Bentham was not alone among contemporary readers in thinking that Blackstone formulated a misleadingly broad statement of parliament's legislative powers; see, e.g., Sedgwick, James, Remarks Critical and Miscellaneous on the Commentaries of Sir William Blackstone (London, 1800), p. 126Google Scholar.

69 Comm., 1:46.

70 Ibid., p. 161. Blackstone further explained that this conception of sovereign legislative authority entailed a restrictive reading of the controversial common law doctrine associated with Coke that “acts of parliament contrary to reason are void.” See his discussion of the common law rules for the construction of statutes at p. 91.

71 Ibid., pp. 161–62. Blackstone's concern to combat political radicalism has been suggested as the central intention of the Commentaries in two recent accounts: see Willman (n. 47 above), pp. 68–70; and Katz, Stanley N., in Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England: A Facsimile of the first edition of 1765–1769, 4 vols. (Chicago, 1979), 1:x (editorial introduction)Google Scholar.

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73 Comm. (n. 13 above), 1:10.

74 Ibid., pp. 416–17.

75 Ibid., p. 365. See also 2:342–43, where Blackstone again advances the argument with regard to the failed legislative attempts to regulate “alienation by deed” since “the disuse of the old Saxon custom of transacting all conveyances at the county court.”

76 Ibid., 4:3.

77 Ibid., pp. 1–19 (on the “Nature of Crimes and Punishments”).

78 DeLolme, Jean Louis, The Constitution of England, or an Account of the English Government (1771; reprint, London, 1775), p. 161.Google Scholar

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80 Ibid., p. 380.

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85 Comm. (n. 13 above), 3:380.

86 Ibid., p. 82.

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88 Comm., 4:280–82. The issues raised by Blackstone's protest are examined in Landau, esp. pt. 4.

89 Comm., 4:349–50.

90 Ibid., 1:365.

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92 Comm., 4:420.

93 Ibid., 4:438–40, and 439n. This was the time of only the “theoretical perfection” of the law on account of the “great practical oppression” of Charles II's reign. For a fuller treatment, see Willman (n. 47 above).

94 See Comm., 4:427, where the phrase is used, after Hale, in reference to the consolidation of “the distributive justice of the kingdom” secured in the reign of Edward I; see 4:425; and Hale, pp. 101–2.

95 See Blackstone's Letter to Mr. Richmond at Sparsholt (1745),” reprinted in Harvard Law Review 32 (19181919): 975–76Google Scholar (spelling modernized).

96 Comm. (n. 13 above), 1:10.

97 Ibid., 3:268.

98 Ibid.

99 Ibid., p. 267.

100 Ibid., 1:4–6.

101 Ibid., p. 9.

102 Ibid., pp. 10–11 (emphasis added).

103 See nn. 24–28 above.

104 Comm., 1:9.

105 Bentham, , A Fragment on Government (n. 15 above), p. 413Google Scholar. For the attempts in the eighteenth century to use the universities to revive legal education, see Holdsworth, , A History of English Law (n. 33 above), 12:77101Google Scholar; and Hanbury, H. G., The Vinerian Chair and Legal Education (Oxford, 1958), pp. 321–37Google Scholar. Blackstone's considerable efforts to secure and exploit the Vinerian chair are explored by Sutherland, Lucy in “William Blackstone and the Legal Chairs at Oxford,” in Evidence in Literary Scholarship: Essays in Memory of James Marshall Osborn, ed. Wellek, Rene and Ribeiro, Alvaro (Oxford, 1979), pp. 229–40Google Scholar; and by Barton, J. L. in “Legal Studies,” in The History of the University of Oxford: The Eighteenth Century, ed. Sutherland, L. S. and Mitchell, L. G. (Oxford, 1986), pp. 600605Google Scholar.

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107 Simpson, , “The Rise and Fall of the Legal Treatise” (n. 27 above), p. 658Google Scholar; Kennedy (n. 25 above), p. 371. See also the nineteenth-century assessments cited above at nn. 8–12 above.

108 On the development of parliamentary government during William's reign, see Carter, Jennifer, “The Revolution and the Constitution,” in Britain after the Glorious Revolution, ed. Holmes, Geoffrey (London, 1969), pp. 3958Google Scholar. For the resulting increase in legislation, see Horwitz, Henry, Policy and Politics in the Reign of William III (Manchester, 1977), p. 325Google Scholar; and Innes, Joanna and Styles, John, “The Crime Wave: Recent Writing on Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth Century England,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986): 420–30Google Scholar. This parliamentary lawmaking receives fuller analysis by Joanna Innes and John Styles in their “The Bloody Code in Context: Eighteenth Century Criminal Legislation Reconsidered: A Report of Work in Progress” (December, 1984, typescript). The author is greatly indebted to Innes and Styles for permitting him to examine their study.

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117 Bentham Manuscripts, c. 1775, draft on “Punishment in alienam personam,” University College, London, Box CXL, fol. 92.

118 Debate over reform of the penal law, however, did generate more ambitious programs of constructive legislative action than in other areas of law. Lieberman (n. 17 above) attempts to delineate these differences, chap. 10.

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130 Maitland's phrase, cited above at n. 9.

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