Blackstone's Criminal Law: Common-Law Harmonization and Legislative Reform

Well known as an apologist for the status quo and an elegant stylist whose stately cadences and perfectly balanced sentences strive to present the common law as an impermeable system, Blackstone is often seen as an exponent of contemporaneous law, one whose efforts were devoted to synthesis and generalization rather than criticism or normative appraisal. Indeed, when modern jurists turn to Blackstone, it is usually because of their assumption that the Commentaries can be taken to provide an accurate picture of eighteenth-century English legal thought and practice, a picture whose objectivity is guaranteed because of the author’s aim to give a comprehensive account of the law as it stood, not of the law as he wished it to be. There is much to be said for the view of Blackstone as an advocate for the correctness of the law. Moreover, Blackstone’s style has a deep affinity with his celebratory aims: his style does not simply amplify those aims but is itself a means of achieving them, as we may see from some of his most famously rhetorical statements, which strive to evoke, through their use of metaphor, the value of gradual legal change and the danger of attempting to hasten it. Nevertheless, Blackstone was also an advocate of legal reform, most notably in his discussion of criminal law, a subject that he seems to have deemed eligible for such treatment insofar as it was aligned with statutory law rather than common law. Thus Blackstone was among the first in the Anglo-American legal tradition to combine the roles of expositor of contemporary doctrine and advocate for reform, a combination that today is taken for granted as a primary task of legal scholarship.