New provinces of writing and legal education: law, language and society in Blackstone's Commentaries

Blackstone’s inclination to academic studies, the application of the Ab ovo doctrine to legal education, and the needs of both a new audience and a new reading public cohered in the Commentaries, which is the most important eighteenth-century “educational innovation” in legal studies. The Commentaries represent an important text both for legal scholars and linguists. Despite Blackstone’s claim that the way of articulating the law – be it viva voce […], by writing, printing, or the like – was “a matter of great indifference” as long as legal procedures were conveyed through outer signs, the author’s awareness of the intrinsic relevance of the Commentaries as a written form of discourse challenged the traditional distinction between “the lex non scripta, the unwritten, or common law; and the lex scripta, the written, or statute law.” The book was unquestionably the outcome of a chasm, which was both ideological and discursive.