The Mysterious Science of the Law: An Essay on Blackstone’s Commentaries

Product Description

Referred to as the “bible of American lawyers,” Blackstone’s
Commentaries on the Laws of England shaped the principles of law in both England and America when its first volume appeared in 1765. For the next century that law remained what Blackstone made of it. Daniel J. Boorstin examines why
Commentaries became the most essential knowledge that any lawyer needed to acquire. Set against the intellectual values of the eighteenth century-and the notions of Reason, Nature, and the Sublime—
Commentaries is at last fitted into its social setting. Boorstin has provided a concise intellectual history of the time, illustrating all the elegance, social values, and internal contradictions of the Age of Reason.

From the Back Cover

‘The bible of American lawyers, ‘ Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England has been the most influential book in English on our legal system and has nourished the American renaissance of the common law ever since its publication (1765-69). Here is Daniel J. Boorstin’s great essay on the Commentaries, showing how Blackstone, employing eighteenth-century ideas of science, religion, history, aesthetics, and philosophy, made of the law both a conservative and a mysterious science.

About the Author

Daniel J. Boorstin, the former Librarian of Congress, is the author of
The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson and is the editor of
An American Primer and the series,
The Chicago History of American Civilization.