William Blackstone and the Historians

Abstract

The article looks the views of jurist William Blackstone on wife-beating, on the right of Indigenous or Aboriginal peoples and on slavery. Blackstone judged that the man who physically beat his wife with a stick no thicker than a man's thumb was doing so for her own good. Blackstone divides colonies into two types. On the one hand were those acquired by conquest or treaty, where existing local laws would continue to prevail unless and until they were changed by the British Crown as incoming sovereign. On the other hand lay colonies of settlement. INSETS: William Blackstone; Common Law and Indigenous Custom; James Somerset, slavery and the common law of England.