At first glance William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in the 1760s, can appear the most conservative and Anglican of texts, rooting aspect after aspect of English law in the mists of an immemorial past. On closer inspection, however, Blackstone's sophisticated Enlightenment thinking can be detected in his attempt at a systematic exposition of fundamental, rational principles of the common law, one that looks to human interactions, rather than to God, for explanations of social organization and the development of law. Where did this new conceptualization of law come from? Julia Rudolph's highly ambitious examination of common law and Enlightenment provides answers to this question while raising many more.

Rudolph's primary goal is to counter the long-standing suggestion that the common law went into decline after 1688, its jurisprudence stagnating as its practitioners remained blind to the intellectual advances and rapid economic and social change that followed the Glorious Revolution. In particular, she dismisses the assumption that a common-law fixation on precedent, custom, and long usage was incompatible with Enlightenment ideals of rationality, secularization, and reform: accepting such a dichotomy, she argues, involves the double mistake of relying on an overly narrow European definition of Enlightenment and of misrepresenting the evolution of common law.

Freed up by the growing consensus that there were multiple Enlightenments, including distinctive English ones, Rudolph highlights those common-law approaches, methodologies, and conversations that echoed or inspired those of natural and moral philosophers and that reverberated within a vibrant and expanding print culture. Legal training, for example, mirrored scientific thought in its need to marshal unprecedented amounts of printed and unprinted materials, and the chosen solutions combined familiar techniques of organizing information in commonplace books, with new abridgments, specialized treatises, and systematic cross referencing. The results closely resembled emerging programs of “Enlightened Encyclopedism” that sought to make knowledge of all kinds accessible to readers. Moreover, the libraries of prominent lawyers and judges brimmed with literary texts and works on moral philosophy, science, history, religion, and Roman and European law, suggesting a direct engagement with developing intellectual and cultural trends.

In criminal trials, judges oversaw the introduction of rigorous new rules of evidence and allotted time to expert witnesses and medical evidence from autopsies backed up by experimentation and the latest scientific opinion. In print, legal commentators responded to anxieties produced by volatile financial markets in an increasingly commercial world by critiquing the uncertainties surrounding equitable instruments, such as trusts. Chancery bore the brunt of many of these criticisms that highlighted new opportunities for fraud against creditors, property owners, and the state. Direct accusations of corruption by Chancery officials, through the sale of offices or through the misuse of suitors' funds, led to public discussions of morality and accountability as well as gender, in the form of questions about female participation in financial markets. They also prompted reforms and gave renewed vigor to the common law's reputation for certainty, stability and (relative) impartiality.

The application of law in overseas colonies and territories led to intense consideration of questions of jurisdiction and sovereignty. Authors such as Justice Geoffrey Gilbert reflected on the nature of law and legal authority by delving into legal history to analyze stages of human development as well as the evolution of legal forms. These explorations prefigured and provided inspiration not only to Blackstone but also to Edmund Burke and Adam Smith. They did so, furthermore, by confirming the belief that the authority of English laws and legal forms rested on long use and ancient custom. In all these different ways, Rudolph argues, the cultures of the Common Law and the Enlightenment operated in tandem rather than at odds with each other.

The cord of intertwined threads that link the influential voices of the common-law tradition, from Bracton to Coke to Mansfield, is usually assumed to have sagged in the decades separating Matthew Hale and William Blackstone. Most readers will agree that Rudolph has managed to pull in much of that slack. Not everyone, however, will accept that the line is now taut: that common-lawyers were key drivers of Enlightenment, in the public eye as well as in their methods and intellectual approaches.

Rudolph mentions but does not reflect on the significance of the dramatic decline of the Inns of Court as centers of learning and intense jurisprudential debate, which helped prompt the later push to include English law in the university curriculum. Similarly, she is largely silent on the barrage of criticisms leveled at common law inadequacies and the sharp practices involving legal instruments that drove so many defendants to seek relief in Chancery. The genius of the common law rested in its ability to innovate while appearing largely unchanging and it is hard to accept that innovations and responses to change in the early eighteenth century matched those Sir John Baker has revealed for the early sixteenth century and myriad other scholars have identified in the seventeenth century. Why, if the common law had answers to the new commercial demands produced by financial revolution, did Chancery continue to attract so much business at the expense of King's Bench and Common Pleas? It is surely unfortunate that three of Rudolph's key examples of Enlightened legal discussion arose out of allegations of corruption or self-interest; Sir Robert Atkyns losing in Chancery the substantial real estate he gained in his own court of Exchequer that was only intended to be security for a loan, and the impeachments of John Somers and the Earl of Macclesfield. Rudolph carefully reveals the political machinations that shaped these legal proceedings, but examples of jurisprudence free from such obvious partiality, and the rivalries of competing jurisdictions, would taste all the sweeter.

The whole question of the public perception of common-law thought and practice clearly requires further attention, and, as with so many elements of Rudolph's bold and provocative book, her welcome call to reconsider the whole subject of law and Enlightenment will help to spur it.