English Justice Sir William Blackstone’s writings are the most cited among our Founders’ writings, after the Bible. Roger Scruton wrote about Blackstone’s importance to our intellectual tradition in his book Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition. I think the substance of this extract justifies my posting it at length:
In all those ways modern conservatism arose as a defence of the individual against potential oppressors, and an endorsement of popular sovereignty. However, it opposed the view that political order is founded on a contract, as well as the parallel suggestion that the individual enjoys freedom, sovereignty and rights in a state of nature, and can throw off the burden of social and political membership, and start again from a condition of absolute freedom. For the conservative, human beings come into this world burdened by obligations, and subject to institutions and traditions that contain within them a precious inheritance of wisdom, without which the exercise of freedom is as likely to destroy human rights and entitlements as to enhance them.
The first great modern defender of that kind of conservatism in Britain was the judge Sir William Blackstone (1723–1780), whose Commentaries on the Laws of England (4 vols, 1765–69) set out to defend the English common law and unwritten constitution as concrete applications of the natural law. Blackstone represented the English constitution and common-law jurisdiction as solutions, tested by time and custom, to the problems of social conflict and the needs of orderly government. It is “the persistence of these institutions over time and their inscription in the hearts of the English people that have created the love of liberty and the instinctive rejection of tyrannical government that are the true marks of English patriotism. This love of liberty is more the creation of custom and tradition than the expression of some spontaneous choice; and it is the long-term perspective of the common law that is the true fount of political order, rather than any contract between the citizens.
Blackstone’s ideas have been influential throughout the subsequent centuries, and his defence of the common law has been taken up and amplified in our time by Friedrich von Hayek (see Chapter 5, below). He set the tone of Anglophone conservatism as it emerged through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: sceptical, empirical, focused on the concrete inheritance of a people and its institutions rather than on abstract ideas of political legitimacy designed to apply to all people everywhere. At the same time, he gave historical and empirical content to the theory of natural law by bringing it down from the theological stratosphere into the common-law courts of England, of which he was Lord Chief Justice.”
It is a good sign that the citations of Blackstone in U.S. Supreme Court cases have been rising in recent years to heights not seen since the early 19th century.