Blackstone in America: How one English treatise shaped early U.S. scholarship

Ask any early American lawyer which single book taught them “the law,” and odds are they’d point to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69). Elegant, system-minded, and readable, Blackstone’s four volumes turned a sprawling common-law tradition into a coherent map—and that map guided generations of American readers as they built courts, trained lawyers, and argued over a written Constitution.

From Oxford lectures to an American bestseller

Blackstone wrote for students who needed the big picture. His Commentaries surveyed “rights of persons,” “rights of things,” private wrongs, and public wrongs—an architecture that made English law look teachable. American demand was instant. Philadelphia printer Robert Bell produced the first American edition by subscription in 1771–72 (continuing into 1773), an ambitious colonial project with a subscriber list in the thousands, evidence that lawyers, merchants, and civic leaders were buying the set to read and to own.

A portable law school for a new republic

In the early United States—where formal law schools barely existed—Blackstone often was the curriculum. George Wythe, America’s first law professor at William & Mary (appointed 1779), assigned Commentaries alongside mock trials and legislative exercises; his students included John Marshall and Bushrod Washington. In Connecticut, Tapping Reeve’s Litchfield Law School, the country’s most influential early private law school, organized its 14-month course around Blackstone’s framework. For aspiring lawyers reading law in offices from Boston to Charleston, “doing Blackstone” was the common starting point.

Reception: translating British common law into American law

After independence, most states “received” the English common law to fill legal gaps until American statutes and decisions accumulated. Blackstone didn’t make that policy, but he explained the colonial rule of reception and supplied the reference work judges and lawyers actually used. Classic scholarship traces how states incorporated English law (with local limits) and relied on treatises like Blackstone’s to operationalize the transition.

Adapting the text: Tucker, Kent, Story

Americans didn’t just read Blackstone; they rewrote him for a constitutional republic. In 1803, St. George Tucker published a five-volume American edition with dense notes tying English doctrines to the U.S. and Virginia constitutions. His appended View of the Constitution of the United States became the first extended, systematic constitutional commentary in the new nation—a bridge between Blackstone’s common law and American constitutionalism.

By the 1820s–30s, James Kent’s Commentaries on American Law and Joseph Story’s treatises built an American canon. Kent was soon nicknamed “the American Blackstone,” signaling both continuity with the English model and a pivot to U.S. sources and institutions.

Blackstone and the Founding generation’s debates

The Founders read Blackstone closely—sometimes to disagree with him. On sovereignty, for example, Blackstone’s world presupposed Parliament’s supremacy; James Wilson, Supreme Court Justice and constitutional theorist, used his Philadelphia law lectures to insist that in America the people were sovereign. Those lectures frequently invoked and then recast Blackstone’s categories to fit a written constitution grounded in popular authority.

On rights, Blackstone’s “absolute rights” of individuals (security, liberty, property) and his famous definition of press liberty (no prior restraints, but post-publication liability) entered American discussion—sometimes embraced, sometimes contested—as courts and commentators worked out what the First Amendment and due process would mean here.

Courts: citation, method, and authority

Early U.S. courts leaned on Blackstone as a one-stop source for common-law principles, procedural norms, and interpretive method. Historical citation studies show the Commentaries were the single most-cited external authority in the Supreme Court’s early opinions; even today, when justices reconstruct eighteenth-century legal understandings, Blackstone remains a go-to starting point. The habits he modeled—reasoning from cases, organizing doctrine systematically, tracing legal “rights” and “wrongs”—became habits of American judging and teaching.

Slavery and antislavery uses

Blackstone condemned “pure and proper slavery” as “repugnant to reason, and the principles of natural law,” and that stance, together with Lord Mansfield’s decision in Somerset (1772), armed antislavery lawyers with moral and legal arguments—even as Southern jurists worked to reconcile Blackstone’s natural-law posture with positive law protecting slavery. Classroom notes and treatises from Virginia show exactly those tensions: professors conceded Blackstone’s natural-law critique while maintaining the legality of slavery under state law.

Why Blackstone “took” in America

Clarity and architecture. Blackstone’s gift was synthesis: he made the common law teachable. In a country building courts and bar institutions almost from scratch, that mattered immensely.

Availability. Cheap American printings put the set on colonial and early national bookshelves—lawyers’ offices, college libraries, even private homes. Subscription networks and reprints gave it reach far beyond London.

Adaptability. Tucker, Kent, Story, and Wilson could quote Blackstone, then amend him for a constitutional republic. The Commentaries were authoritative without being untouchable—a feature, not a bug, in a rapidly changing legal order.

The long tail

By the mid-nineteenth century, American treatises increasingly displaced Blackstone as first-resort authority, but not his influence. Legal education kept his structure (rights of persons/things; wrongs; remedies) long after casebooks replaced treatises in the classroom, and appellate courts still cite Blackstone when they need a compact statement of eighteenth-century doctrine. Even modern opinions that debate original meaning often start with a Blackstone passage.

Bottom line

If early American legal scholarship needed a scaffolding, Blackstone supplied it. He gave lawyers a shared vocabulary, teachers a course outline, judges a canon, and reformers a foil. The Commentaries helped Americans carry forward the common law while learning how—and when—to depart from it. That’s why, two and a half centuries later, you still hear his voice in American legal argument: sometimes quoted, sometimes challenged, always in the room.