Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England by Kathryn D. Temple (review)

To say that Kathryn D. Temple’s new book fills a gap in literary scholarship would be a massive understatement. Over hundreds of years, William Blackstone, author of the four-volume Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–70), touched authors’ imaginations throughout Europe and the US, and the Commentaries has been a key text for any scholar who has wanted to say anything about marriage, property relations, punishment, or any other aspect of the law from the eighteenth century onwards. Many have depended on his characterizations of legal history to summarize centuries of legal practice even before Blackstone’s publication. Temple generously credits others like Daniel Boorstin who have written on the Commentaries with “humanities-oriented” approaches, but hers is the only full-length study of Blackstone that fully accounts for his importance in literature from the gothic novel to To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), and it is the only study that approaches Blackstone’s work with the literary sensibility and theoretical sophistication that it truly deserves.

Temple argues that Blackstone sought to ensconce idealized versions of common law within the balance and rationality of his own ambitious Commentaries. Rather than merely dismiss Blackstone’s ambitions as a charming relic from legal history, she shows his limitations as well as his insights—insights which she deftly weaves into a new juridical perspective by her book’s end. In Blackstone’s view, as Temple explains in her introduction, “the common law was a chaotic mess of inexplicably conflicting written case reports and precedents, half-remembered practices, and adages” (2). Jurists depended on compendia by a range of authors such as Matthew Hale and Thomas Wood, but these were widely regarded as incomplete. Blackstone’s Commentaries is in one sense remarkable for its ambitious attempt to comprehend every topic with a sense of enlightened and learned accomplishment. But it is in another sense remarkable, Temple argues, for inflecting the law with a sense of aesthetic and emotional intensity. Drawing on his youthful poem “The Lawyer’s Farewell to His Muse” to make her case, she shows how Blackstone from an early age acknowledged the emotional complexity behind the law and, by giving it order, provided “harmonic justice” for it (8). In contrast to the “loose revelry and riot” (12) of contemporary law practice, Blackstone sought justice in a serene “balance” between tradition and change, precedent and contingency (14).

Temple’s methods here are “curatorial,” a methodology that demands its own sense of balance (18). While appreciating Blackstone’s ambitions, she also provides a sceptical perspective on the enlightened confidence of the author’s claims to rationality. She attends to issues of “form,” furthermore, while also connecting purposeful design to the world of human emotion (19). This method proves remarkably productive in the first chapter’s framing by Wilkie Collins’s novel Armadale (1864–66): as Neelie and Allan contemplate elopement, they consult Blackstone only to find that their marriage would have no legal standing without “consent of the father” (28). Collins’s lovers find themselves in a predicament in which the “desire” for legal sanction ends in disappointment and even “disgust” at the “hyper-rationality of the law” (31). The desire/disgust dyad leads Temple back to “The Lawyer’s Farewell,” showing how Blackstone’s own attitudes waver between attraction and repulsion: justice, personified as an Orientalized “Eastern Queen,” is both an alluring object of desire and a forbidding source of tyrannical authority (35).

Chapter 2 returns to the poem, specifically to its imagery of burial and loss, demonstrating how melancholy structures Blackstone’s entire account of property law. The logic of melancholy—which centres on the incorporation of a lost object of desire—illuminates Blackstone’s view of the lost harmony between rulers and subjects in ancient property relationships. Modern property law, with its complex and bewildering code governing ownership and inheritance, buries a “heroic, communal past” with “vulnerable bodies,” which are dead but never...