Blackstone's "Commentaries" -- Ch. 27 (excerpt only)

minor update 001028
last minor update 20030403

Book IV.

Of Public Wrongs

[table of contents]

[...]

Chap. XXVII.
Of Trial, and Conviction ................ [p.] 336

Chapter the Twenty Seventh

Of Trial, and Conviction

[...]

[begin p. 352]

[...]

FOURTHLY, all presumptive evidence of felony should be admitted cautiously: for the law holds, that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

[end of excerpts]

Editor's note --
Not being a legal scholar, I do not know if William Blackstone had any specific source for his assertion here about "the law." Did he make it up out of whole cloth, as Thomas Jefferson would a few years later, claiming in the US Declaration of Independence a "right of the people" to alter or abolish a destructive government?

"Bartlett's Familiar Quotations" (15th Edition) provides an earlier quote from Voltaire's Zadig (1747), "It is better to risk saving a guilty person that to condemn an innocent one." Voltaire and Blackstone, in different professions, may have drawn inspiration from a common humanist intellectual trend.

Links to on-line editions of Blackstone's Commentaries

Even if it is no longer particularly relevant to English and American law, it makes interesting reading. Earlier parts of Chapter 27, for example, discuss "trial by ordeal" and other quaint medieval relics.

Pheroze Jagose tipped me off that Yale Law School's "Avalon Project" has posted it at URL:
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/blackstone/blacksto.htm

On April 2003, Lonang Institute notified me of an easier-to-read scan. (Among other things, the 18th century "s" that looks like an "f" is rendered as a modern "s".)
http://www.lonang.com/exlibris/blackstone/index.html

"The Liberty Library of Constitutional Classics"
Tucker's Blackstone, St. George Tucker (1803), The Commentaries on the Laws of England by William Blackstone (1769), with additional commentaries by Tucker adapting the common law to the needs of the U.S. Constitution.
http://www.constitution.org/tb/tb-0000.htm
has Blackstone, but numbered differently. Also, its footnotes and analogies to American law can be distracting, depending what you are looking for.
To reduce confusion, I will cross-reference the volume numbers of Blackstone and Tucker's Blackstone.

Blackstone volume matching Tucker volume
Volume 1, introduction Volume 1, introduction
(not applicable) Volume 1, Appendix on American law
Volume 1 (except introduction) Volume 2
Volume 2 Volume 3
Volume 3 Volume 4
Volume 4 Volume 5

Blackstone volume	matching Tucker volume
Volume 1, introduction	Volume 1, introduction
(not applicable)	Volume 1, Appendix on American law
Volume 1 (except introduction)	Volume 2
Volume 2	Volume 3
Volume 3	Volume 4
Volume 4	Volume 5

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