The Principle
William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) was the most influential law book in the English-speaking world for over a century. Every American lawyer trained before the establishment of law schools learned law from Blackstone. The founding generation - Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Adams - all read and cited him. Nine of the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution were lawyers who had studied the Commentaries, and Justice Story described them as having exercised an influence on American legal education "scarcely exceeded by that of the Bible." What Blackstone built was a systematic account of English law grounded explicitly in divine law, natural law, and Scripture - making biblical principles foundational to American jurisprudence through the medium of the most-read legal text of the age.
Biblical Foundation
Blackstone opened his Introduction with a systematic natural law theology in which Scripture played a central role. He argued that God, as Creator, had revealed His law through two channels: through reason (natural law) and through Scripture (revealed law). Both were authoritative, and human positive law was valid only insofar as it conformed to them.
His proof text for the primacy of divine law was Psalms 19:7-8: "The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes." Blackstone cited this to demonstrate that divine law preceded and grounded all human legislation.
For the criminal law's foundations, Blackstone pointed to Exodus 20:1-17, the Decalogue: "And God spake all these words, saying, I am the LORD thy God..." The Ten Commandments, he argued, were not merely religious requirements but the moral foundations of English criminal law: the prohibitions on false witness, theft, murder, and adultery were the basis of perjury law, property law, homicide law, and matrimonial law respectively.
Romans 2:14-15 provided the philosophical link: "For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness." Blackstone cited this Pauline passage to ground his claim that natural law was universally accessible through reason, making it binding on all humans regardless of their knowledge of Scripture.
Historical Transmission
Blackstone's theological framework was not original; it drew on a tradition stretching from Aquinas through Hooker and through Grotius. Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594) had established the Church of England's legal theology: all positive law must conform to natural law, and natural law is the participation of rational creatures in divine reason. Blackstone systematized this Anglican natural law tradition and applied it comprehensively to English common law.
The Commentaries arrived in the American colonies in 1771. By 1775, there had been nearly as many copies sold in America as in England - remarkable for a four-volume legal treatise. The colonies had few trained lawyers, no law schools (Harvard Law School was founded in 1817), and the Commentaries served as the standard legal education for the entire founding generation.
James Madison, preparing for the Constitutional Convention, read extensively in natural law theory including Blackstone. Thomas Jefferson, though critical of some of Blackstone's political views, drew on his legal framework. John Adams cited Blackstone more than any other authority in his legal practice. The Declaration of Independence's appeal to "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God" directly echoes Blackstone's natural law theology.
In the early republic, American courts cited Blackstone constantly. Kent's Commentaries on American Law (1826-1830) - the first systematic American legal treatise - was explicitly modeled on Blackstone and maintained his biblical-natural law framework. The influence persisted through Story's Commentaries on the Constitution (1833), ensuring that Blackstone's theological jurisprudence shaped American constitutional law well into the 19th century.
Key Champions
Blackstone himself (1723-1780) is the central figure. His Oxford lectures, delivered from 1753 onward, attracted students from across the British world; the published version reached the American colonies at the precisely critical moment of constitutional formation. Justice James Wilson (1742-1798), one of only six men who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, delivered law lectures at the University of Pennsylvania that explicitly built on Blackstone's biblical natural law framework while extending it in republican directions. Joseph Story (1779-1845) carried Blackstone's influence into the antebellum period through his Harvard lectures and commentaries.
Modern Application
Blackstone's direct influence on modern law is most visible in property law (his account of property as a natural right given by God and protected by law continues to shape conservative constitutional jurisprudence), in natural law arguments in constitutional adjudication (particularly in abortion and Second Amendment cases, where natural law frameworks derive from the Blackstone-Story tradition), and in criminal law's mens rea doctrine (the requirement of a guilty mind, which Blackstone grounded in the biblical account of sin as requiring both act and intention).
In Heller v. District of Columbia (2008), Justice Scalia's majority opinion on Second Amendment rights cited Blackstone repeatedly as evidence of original meaning. In Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the dissents by Roberts and Scalia both implicitly appealed to the natural law tradition that Blackstone had institutionalized. The "living constitution" versus "original meaning" debate in American constitutional law is in part a debate about whether Blackstone's natural-law-anchored constitutionalism continues to bind or whether it has been superseded by a more positivist jurisprudence.
Scholarly Debate
Duncan Kennedy's "The Structure of Blackstone's Commentaries" (1979) argued that Blackstone's work was fundamentally ideological - naturalizing the property and class structures of 18th-century England as divinely ordained. Jeremy Bentham, Blackstone's contemporary and sharpest critic, attacked him for precisely this: using natural law and Scripture to place contingent social arrangements beyond critique. More sympathetically, David Lieberman's The Province of Legislation Determined (1989) situates Blackstone within the history of English natural law theorizing and shows that his biblical grounding was intellectually serious rather than merely decorative. The most productive modern scholarship treats Blackstone as a primary source for understanding how biblical theology actually operated in the formation of Anglo-American law, rather than either celebrating or dismissing his framework.
Comparative Perspective
The parallel figure in the civil law tradition is Justinian's Institutes (533 CE), which similarly opened with a theological account of justice - "justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas jus suum cuique tribuendi" (justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due) - and grounded law in natural reason divinely ordered. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), though superficially more secular, drew on natural law arguments structurally similar to Blackstone's, reflecting the same European tradition of grounding rights in divine or natural order. The difference between the common law and civil law approaches to natural rights - one embodied in judge-made law and precedent, the other in comprehensive codes - reflects institutional rather than theological divergence.