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Grolier Club Exhibitions

Kyle Shephard

Lawyers are natural historians. We help clients navigate legal questions by reference to how similar disputes were resolved in the past. This is especially true in our adopted common law system. As a government lawyer, I am interested in the historic origins of our legal traditions and institutions, especially the philosophical and political theory that supported the transmission of the English common law to the United States during the Age of Enlightenment. 

In his famous “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies” given to Parliament in 1775, Edmund Burke partly attributes the American spirit of freedom to the popular interest of the study of law. “In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The greater number of the deputies sent to the congress were lawyers. But all who read, and most do read, endeavor to obtain some smattering in that science.” 

Two of the books presented here (Blackstone and Domat) are primary textual evidence of legal ideas transferred from England and Europe to the American colonies. Paine’s Rights of Man represents an American expression of the natural law philosophical tradition that influenced the framing of American constitutional liberty.   

William Blackstone
Commentaries on the Laws of England
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1766-69. 
 
Second edition of Volumes I and II, first edition of Volumes III and IV. 

One of the greatest achievements in legal history, Blackstone’s Commentaries was instrumental in defining the vast body of English law and establishing common law as the basis of the American legal system. Read by all of the key Framers, Burke told Parliament that “I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone’s Commentaries in America as in England.” A first American edition was displayed at The Grolier Club in the Autumn 2024 exhibition Abraham Lincoln: His Life in Print. 

Jean Domat
The Civil Law in its Natural Order: Together with the Publick Law
London: Printed by J. Bettenham, for E. Bell, et al., 1722. 
 
Two volumes. First English edition, translated by William Strahan. 

The American legal system and the Framers were also influenced by Continental jurists. Domat was the leading French legal thinker of the 17th century. Jefferson owned a copy of the Strahan translation and Madison included it in his 1783 report on “a list of books proper for the use of Congress.” 

Thomas Paine
Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution Part I printed for J.S. Jordan, 1792. Part II printed for H.D. Symonds, 1792. 

Thomas Paine was a forceful proponent of natural law - a legal and political philosophy that viewed certain rights as being held in common by all people and derived from nature rather than government. Revolution is permissible when government interferes with these natural rights. Rights of Man resulted in Paine and his publisher being indicted for seditious libel. The author was tried in absentia, found guilty, and the tract ordered permanently suppressed. ESTC (N13085) lists only one copy of this variant (Harvard).