Yesterday afternoon, I opened an important old book and was carried back over ten years of memory.
When I say old, I mean the book was printed in 1772. The book is important because it was critical to the development of the modern anti-slavery movement.
I’m in the midst of preparing a series of videos that will tell the story of the legal systems of the world through the story of their books and manuscripts. Right now, I’m working on a video about Blackstone’s Commentaries, the great eighteenth-century survey of the English common law. So I went to visit Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian at Yale Law School, which has the best collection of Blackstone anywhere.
As Mike and I were talking about Blackstone, he also showed me some treasures from his recent headline-making acquisition from the library of British barrister Anthony Taussig. One of them caught me off guard.
Blackstone, Blackstone's Commentaries, Law and Film, Michael Widener, Rare Books, Wilfrid Prest, William Blackstone
Blackstone Goes Hollywood
In Aesthetics, narrative, form, Books and libraries, Conversations, Law and film, Video on May 27, 2014 at 6:25 pmI’ve made a new video—about Blackstone’s Commentaries. It’s also about storytelling form in legal history. My sister-in-law once named a fish Blackstone, which I thought was a very nice sign of respect to the great eighteenth-century explicator of the common law, but the fish plays no part in this video. But Humphrey Bogart does. And so does Orson Welles. You can watch the video here: