William Blackstone and the Historians
Wilfrid Prest unravels myths perpetrated by historians about the great 18th-century lawyer.
We are often exhorted to break down the barriers between the disciplines. So far as law and history are concerned, such urgings are almost redundant. Historians have long drawn upon legal records and texts as sources of evidence about individual and social experience, and legal argument frequently embodies much historical content.
Yet problems can arise when historians employ legal sources. The great legal historian F.W. Maitland (1850-1906) suggested that historians and lawyers operate on distinct wavelengths, using two different modes of argument which he characterized as ‘the logic of authority and the logic of evidence’. Lawyers, according to Maitland, are primarily interested in finding legal authorities, the more recent the better, with which to support the cases of their clients. Historians, on the other hand, recognize themselves as bound by no authority except evidence bearing on the event or phenomena they study; generally speaking, the closer that evidence in time to their subject, the greater its credibility and utility.
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