X-Nico

11 unusual facts about William Blackstone


Daniel Dunklin

The teenage Dunklin worked unsuccessfully at farming while he also studied the writings of William Blackstone and others in hopes of a career as a lawyer.

Doctrine of necessity

The maxim on which the doctrine is based originated in the writings of the medieval jurist Henry de Bracton, and similar justifications for this kind of extra-legal action have been advanced by more recent legal authorities, including William Blackstone.

Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co.

Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, agreed that the ATS does not apply extraterritorially and additionally declared that the statute only applies in the United States for violations of international law as it was understood by Blackstone in 1769.

Lists of landmark court decisions

Charter rights are not “discovered” in the sense proposed by Blackstone, and therefore are not retroactive.

New York County Courthouse

Above the seated figures are portraits of six lawgivers: Hammurabi, Moses, Solon, Justinian, Blackstone and John Marshall.

Penitentiary Act

The Act was drafted by the prison reformer John Howard and the jurist William Blackstone and recommended imprisonment as an alternative sentence to death or transportation.

Prior restraint

In William Blackstone's Commentaries “Freedom of the Press” is defined as the right to be free from prior restraints.

Property Law in Colonial New York

English structural influence was due in large part to the widespread textual invocation of Blackstone.

Vinerian Professor of English Law

Upon Sir William Blackstone's appointment to the Vinerian Professorship, his lectures were the first to be given on the English Common Law in any university in the world.

Who Stole Feminism?

Group activist and writer Laura Flanders blasted the book as filled with "error-filled anecdotes" and "folktales" such as misquoting 18th Century legal scholar William Blackstone as being against domestic violence when he had written in favor of "that which lawfully and reasonably belongs to the husband for the due government and correction of his wife".

William Findley

At one point, Constitutional Convention delegate James Wilson and Pennsylvania Chief Justice Thomas McKean disputed one of Findley's statements about jury trials in Sweden; Findley returned two days later with William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England and demonstrated that his reference had been correct.


Calvin's Case

Owing to its inclusion in the standard legal treatises of the nineteenth century (compiled by Edward Coke, William Blackstone, and James Kent), Calvin's Case was well known in the early judicial history of the United States.

Levi Todd

Among his possessions included silver, fine china and leather-bound books; his personal library also contained rare works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Burke and William Blackstone.