Blackstone revisited

In order to further the legal education component of my manifesto, published yesterday, I intend on doing the following:

1. I will be taking an online text of Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, and will gradually build up links from this weblog to that online text.

2. Additionally, I will be making a summary and precis of each chapter, with the end of condensing the information provided in the Commentaries into a form which can be read profitably by modern readers.

3. I will be doing the above in order to use the texts provided as a basis for a new treatise of modern American common law. This will have the working title, if not the ultimate one, of Brandt on Modern American Common Law

I will be doing so for the following reasons:

A. As I wrote in my Manifesto, I believe that there is a clear need for a text which can assist laymen and women in gaining a competent knowledge of American state and federal law.

B. The Commentaries are perhaps the premier treatise used for the teaching of common law, especially in the United States. They were at the basis of legal education for United States presidents from Jefferson to Lincoln, and for a great many others as well.

C. The Commentaries were also much of the foundation for American Common Law, from the time of the United States' founding as a nation onward.

While I will not rule out the possibility that this new treatise will be published in print or online, its immediate purpose is to provide a free means by which laymen and women can teach themselves American law.