18th and 19th Century Commentators

18th and 19th Century Commentators gathers the judges and legal scholars, in England, Scotland and the young United States alike, born across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries whose commentaries, treatises and judicial opinions shaped the common law into its modern form. Its members include Sir William Blackstone, whose Commentaries on the Laws of England became the standard reference for common law across the English speaking world, the American jurists Joseph Story and James Kent who adapted English common law doctrine for the new United States, and the English legal historians and Law Lords whose work, though sometimes extending into the twentieth century, was rooted in this same nineteenth century tradition of systematic commentary.