Replies

No, because the Wong court covered the “laws of nations” arguments in its decision and plucked out what it needed. Plus, Vattel is merely a commentator on the law, and would hold little or no value to an American court. Many of the Founders were learned men, and lawyers. Practicing law BEFORE the revolution would have required a grounding in English common law. That is the more likely source of the language, by far.

I have no doubt some of the Founders had read Vattel. I think maybe John Jay did from some of the stuff I have read. But the Wong court was very thorough in its reasoning. They went above and beyond the call of duty which is why Wong is still cited today. Maybe they wanted to CYA themselves since they were making Chinamen born here into NBCs.

Plus Blackstone was very influential and a very conservative lawyer. He is some people’s answer to judicial activism.

http://www.blackstoneinstitute.org/

The anti-Blackstoners know not what they do.

This is long, but well worth it:

Sir William Blackstone

The Blackstone Institute honors Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780). Blackstone was the great Eighteenth Century English legal scholar whose philosophy and writings were infused with Judeo-Christian principles. The Ten Commandments are at the heart of Blackstone’s philosophy. Blackstone taught that man is created by God and granted fundamental rights by God. Man’s law must be based on God’s law. Our Founding Fathers referred to Blackstone more than to any other English or American authority. Blackstone’s great work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, was basic to the U. S. Constitution. This work has sold more copies in America than in England and was a basic textbook of America’s early lawyers. It was only in the mid-Twentieth Century that American law, being re-written by the U. S. Supreme Court, repudiated Blackstone. An attack on Blackstone is an attack on the U. S. Constitution and our nation’s Judeo-Christian foundations. The Blackstone Institute is committed to reviving the Constitution and its Blackstonian foundations.

Bashing Blackstone: The Reconstructionists’
Attack in America’s Culture War
[An initial version of this article was published in Rare Jewel Magazine, March-April 2005]

Sir William Blackstone, the eminent Eighteenth Century English law professor and author of Commentaries on the Laws of England, has wielded incalculable effects on law in America for the past 225 years. His Commentaries were the law textbook in Great Britain and the United States well after their initial publication. “Bashing Blackstone” is an invisible but critical dimension of the Reconstructionists (liberal/activist) attack in American’s Culture War. We Constitutionalists must therefore arm ourselves with a basic knowledge of Blackstone and his Commentaries.

I. Why Study Blackstone’s Commentaries?

Commentaries on the Laws of England (published between 1765 and 1769) by Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780) has been abandoned in the Humanistic jurisprudence (legal and constitutional philosophy) that permeates contemporary anti-Judeo-Christian judicial decisions.1 Blackstone also is virtually absent from American legal education today. What, then, is the significance of Blackstonian thought to today’s law?

The answer is simple. Blackstone’s Commentaries are one of the most complete, consistent, humanly authored expositions of the Judeo-Christian worldview of law ever written. Blackstone’s immeasurable influence on both English and American law was universally recognized until well into the Twentieth Century, although the “bashing of Blackstone” in America began after the Civil War. Christopher Columbus Langdell a militant evolutionist who became Dean of the Harvard Law School in 1870, thought Blackstonian principles had to be ripped from American law not because they were wrong, but because they were a bulwark of protection against the growing Humanistic movement headed by Langdell and other elitists.2

But Blackstone’s jurisprudential views were not quickly eliminated. In the views of distinguished observers, “The influence of Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Laws of England . . . was phenomenal and as great in American as in England”; 3 and “Upon Blackstone’s Commentaries, United States Supreme Court Justice John Marshall and other early American jurists built the American legal system.”4 Indeed, in the most notable of Marshall’s decisions, he cited Blackstone several times to advance the concept of Constitutional supremacy over the power of judges.5 This fact is especially important today since judicial supremacists still cite Marbury as the source of judicial power. We must forcefully and consistently insist that these judges exercise judicial review only if they understand and apply this power within the entire context of Marshall’s – i.e., Blackstonian – philosophy.

Statistics also demonstrate Blackstone’s influence in America. Drs. Donald S. Lutz and Charles S. Hyneman analyzed the various sources read and cited by our Founding Fathers; Blackstone was by far the most-cited English/American scholar.6 The American Revolution was a revolt against the politics of English government, but not its legal foundations; the Commentaries, in fact, were cited nearly 10,000 times in the reports of American courts between 1789 and 1915.7

In the world of Humanistic scholarship today, these facts are ignored because history in general is scorned as central to the process of interpreting the US Constitution. But Humanists as well as the rest of us constantly cite history. The only question is whom they cite and when that which they cite occurred. The principles of

Blackstone’s CommentariesBlackstone’s Commentaries infuse our Constitution, and their revival deserves our most careful attention today.

II. Who Was Sir William Blackstone?

William Blackstone was born in 1723, several months after his father’s death. His mother died when he was 12 years old. Considered a poor orphaned boy, he nonetheless received an excellent education, supported by prominent individuals, and did well in his studies. The legal profession eventually claimed him; he was entered as a student of law in the Inns of Court at the Middle Temple8 ; and in 1746 he joined the bar.

In 1750 Blackstone received the degree of Doctor of Civil Law and left the practice of law for academic life. In 1758 he was elected the first Vinerian Professor of Law at Oxford. Blackstone was highly regarded by his contemporaries who shared our Judeo-Christian worldview. Professor Frederic Maitland declared that “Bracton [“Father of Common Law”] 9 was rivaled by no English juridical writer till Blackstone arose five centuries afterwards. Twice in the history of England has an Englishman had the motive, the courage, the power to write a great readable, reasonable book about English law as a whole.”10 But his ideas drew some criticism, particularly from Jeremy Bentham, the empiricist whose views were antithetical to the Judeo-Christian worldview and significantly contributed to attacks on this worldview by later Humanists.

Blackstone wrote the Commentaries to organize and explain English law as it had come to exist by the late 1800s. He desired to reach not only “the Profession of the Common Law; but of such others also, as are desirous to be in some Degree acquainted with the Constitution and Polity of their own Country”11 and “to render the whole [of his analysis of the Common Law] intelligible to the uniformed minds of beginners . . . .”12 Blackstone first presented his material as lectures, but after students sold notes purporting to be his thoughts, he published his own edition, in four volumes.

parsy, who says it should be the 18th century, not the late 1800s