More than any other historian, Wilfrid Prest has extended and deepened our understanding of the life, thought, and writings of William Blackstone, author of one of the most important books of the common law, The Commentaries on the Laws of England (1756), and the first person to lecture on the common law at a university. Prest has edited The Letters of Sir William Blackstone, 1744–1780 (2006), authored a definitive biography of Blackstone, and was general editor of a variorum edition of the Commentaries. He has also edited three volumes of essays on the impact and influence of Blackstone and the Commentaries. Taken together, this body of work sheds new light on hitherto neglected aspects of Blackstone's life and work. By juxtaposing newer with more traditional approaches to law and lawyers in history, including art history and literary criticism, alongside legal analysis and legal history, it transcends disciplinary tribalism, illuminating Blackstone's significance for historians, lawyers and those working on law, literature, and culture.

Blackstone and His Critics is the third collection on Blackstone edited by Prest (now joined by Anthony Page). It discusses how Blackstone and his Commentaries attracted both praise and criticism during and beyond Blackstone's lifetime. This is not unfamiliar territory, making it harder to add to what readers may already know. The collection opens with Page and Prest's survey of Blackstone's early career, its implications for his later reputation, and initial reactions to the Commentaries. They also outline the other contributions to this volume.

Michael Lobban, in the first substantive essay, usefully analyzes the Commentaries in the context of English legal literature before Blackstone. Lobban argues that the originality of the Commentaries lies in its well-organized form and clear, comprehensible style, rather than its content. He sees Blackstone's theoretical explanations of his material as less satisfactory, being derived from a mix of theoretical positions that were in tension, if not contradictory and lacking a theory for the judge or jurist to take the law forward.

Jeremy Bentham, Blackstone's most ardent critic, figures prominently in the next two chapters. Philip Schofield compares Bentham's engagement with Blackstone in A Fragment of Government (1776) and in a body of contemporaneous material, with an apparently unfinished essay Bentham composed fifty years later. He reveals extraordinary consistencies and striking developments in terms of their being put to political use, concluding that Bentham's increasing radicalism, the implementation of which would have seen the overthrow of every institution Blackstone cherished, emerged from his engagement with Blackstone. Without Blackstone, Bentham would have been very different. Jessie Allen provides a fresh perspective on Bentham's criticism, reading the Commentaries account of judicial interpretation in the light of literature on the nature and significance of ritual. Allen focuses on the importance Blackstone attached to the judicial performance of law finding, seeing the performative means a court used to reach its results equal in importance to the substantive result. Whereas Bentham regarded the rituals of the law as irrational and needing reform, Blackstone regarded them as having a rationale and as symptoms of strength.

The next two chapters explore religion and politics in the context of Blackstone's Oxford and English Protestant dissent. Building on J. G. A. Pocock's notion of multiple enlightenments, Ian Doolittle presents Blackstone as part of a conservative Oxford enlightenment that defended the privileges of the established church. Anthony Page examines the critical response of Dissenters to Blackstone's defense of limited religious toleration, concluding that this controversy helped inspire Rational Dissenters to campaign for full religious freedom guaranteed in law and become champions of parliamentary reform, and their opponents to bolster their cause by the authority of the Commentaries.

The Commentaries also served as an important defense of the status quo in Ireland, and Ultan Gillen's paper focuses on Blackstone's place in Irish political argument. Gillen argues that Blackstone's diverse Irish critics challenged the Commentaries, albeit selectively and superficially, for their prominence in defining the principles of the British and Irish elites. This, he concludes, produced some of the more interesting political thought in late eighteenth-century Ireland, helping to reshape thinking on the major political question of the era, Ireland's relationship with Britain, and Irish patriotism in a revolutionary age.

Tim Stretton, in another interesting essay, examines Blackstone's defense of the exclusion of “half-bloods” from inheritance, arguing that this does not indicate Blackstone was simply a defender of the legal status quo, but, rather, was naive, not cynical, being “motivated by a sincerely held belief in the logic of the law” (131). Similarly, Carolyn Steedman challenges critics who take Blackstone's treatment of marriage and coverture at face value, seeing Blackstone's account as more nuanced than frequently assumed, with the experience of women in the eighteenth century being more complex and multifaceted than suggested by Blackstone's statement of the law.

That Blackstone was cited by both defenders and critics of the status quo, and that the Commentaries emphatically remained a text in use, is also a key theme of David Lieberman's account of Blackstone's impact on the debates surrounding the academic teaching of law in the common law world. While much of this is familiar, Lieberman's discussion of Albert Venn Dicey's repositioning of Blackstone as a classic of English letters—an oft-neglected but fascinating episode in the ongoing struggle to ascertain Blackstone's contribution and current meaning—is especially welcome. David Rabban explores the close connections between the historical school of American jurisprudence and Blackstone, while John Orth emphasizes the contradictory responses to Blackstone in the writings of an American Progressive judge. The volume concludes with Prest's brief but incisive survey of the highs and lows of Blackstone's posthumous reputation.

Overall, this is an excellent set of essays. Particularly valuable is its problematizing of zero-sum, one-dimensional treatments of Blackstone and his impact. It points to a more nuanced and paradoxical Blackstone, one subject to a welter of interpretations by wide-ranging audiences.