Law Tracts
by William Blackstone
Sir William Blackstone, law reporter, judge, and Oxford's first Vinerian Professor of English Law, is better known as the author of Commentaries on the Laws of England.[1] Law Tracts predated that publication by three years and compiled for the first time several of Blackstone's earlier works. Texts reprinted in volume I include Essay on Collateral Consanguinity, previously published in 1750, Considerations, published originally in 1758, and Treatise on the Law of Descents, a work from 1759. Blackstone's work on the Magna Carta from 1759, "The Great Charter and Charter of the Forest, with Other Authentic Instruments: to which is Prefixed an Introductory Discourse, Containing the History of the Charters", comprised the whole of volume II. According to one biographer, "[t]hese self-published reports were almost certainly intended as money-making ventures."[2]
Bibliographic Information
Author: William Blackstone (1723-1780)
Title: Law Tracts, in Two Volumes.
Published: Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1762.
Edition: First collected ed.
Evidence for Inclusion in Wythe's Library
The evidence is not conclusive although it would not be surprising that Wythe owned this title. The copy in Thomas Jefferson's Library at the Library of Congress has the signature of D. Carr on the title page.[3] Jefferson gave Carr, his nephew, many of Wythe's law books. Whether the Library of Congress copy is one of these titles and how this particular set ended up in the library Jefferson sold is unknown.
Description of the Wolf Law Library's copy
Two octavo volumes bound in recent hessian cloth with gilt lettering and rules to spines.
View this book in William & Mary's online catalog.
External Links
Google Books Volume 1
Google Books Volume 2
References
- ↑ Wilfrid Prest, ‘Blackstone, Sir William (1723–1780)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2009, accessed 19 June 2013
- ↑ Wilfrid Prest, William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century", (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 214.
- ↑ Bennie Brown, "The Library of George Wythe of Williamsburg and Richmond," (unpublished manuscript, May, 2012) Microsoft Word file. Earlier edition available at: https://digitalarchive.wm.edu/handle/10288/13433
