Commentaries on the Laws of England.

"The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual's private rights": Finely Bound set of william Blackstone's Influential Work Commentaries on the Laws of England

Commentaries on the Laws of England.

BLACKSTONE, William.

Item Number: 50021

London: W. Strahan, T. Cadell, and D. Prince, 1783.

Finely bound set of Blackstone’s landmark work. Octavo, 4 volumes. Bound in full period calf, gilt titles and tooling to the spine, red leather title labels lettered in gilt, small oval green leather labels with volume numbers, portrait frontispiece in volume one, one plate and folding chart in volume two. Ninth Edition, stated. This edition contains the last corrections made during the life of the author. In very good condition.

Blackstone's work succeeded that of Edward Coke as the foundational treatise on English law. PMM states "Blackstone's great work on the laws of England is the extreme example of justification of an existing state of affairs by virtue of its history... Until the Commentaries, the ordinary Englishman had viewed the law as a vast, unintelligible and unfriendly machine... Blackstone's great achievement was to popularize the law and the traditions which had influenced its formation... He takes a delight in describing and defending as the essence of the constitution the often anomalous complexities which had grown into the laws of England over the centuries. But he achieves the astonishing feat of communicating this delight, and this is due to a style which is itself always lucid and graceful." The influence of Blackstone on the Founding Fathers should not be understated. While Jefferson ultimately grew to dislike Blackstone, Hamilton cited the Commentaries in Federalists No. 69 and 84 to bolster the case for the Constitution. Grolier/English 52; PMM 212; Rothschild 407.

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