Julia Rudolph, ‘William Blackstone, Family Man: New Contexts in Gender, Jurisprudence, and Jamaica’, Law & History Review 1 (2026). William Blackstone is, of course, an omnipresent name for law students and law professors alike. At least once a week during the semester, I teach a Supreme Court opinion that cites the eighteenth-century English jurist’s writings for some proposition or another. Typically, though, these opinions give no introduction to the man behind the quotations. Sentences begin with phrases like, ‘As Blackstone explained’, ‘Blackstone denounced’, and ‘Blackstone says’, as if the words come from some disembodied presence rather than an actual man. As a result, William Blackstone the person can remain curiously abstract in legal education, for all the ubiquity of his name. In fact, I learned from Julia Rudolph’s article ‘William Blackstone, Family Man’ that even those historians who are specialists in his era have lots of unanswered questions about his inner life … (more)
[Sara Mayeux, JOTWELL, 12 October 2026]
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