A student finds
there a smattering of every thing, and his indolence easily persuades
him, that if he understands that book, he is master of the whole body
of the law. The distinction between these and those who have drawn their
stores from the deep and rich mines of Coke's Littleton, seems
well understood even by the unlettered common people, who apply the
appellation of Blackstone-lawyers to these ephemeral insects of the law.
Whether we should undertake to reduce the common law, our own, and
so much of the English statutes as we have adopted, to a text, is a
question of transcendant difficulty. It was discussed at the first
meeting of the committee of the revised code, in 1776, and decided
in the negative, by the opinions of Wythe, Mason, and myself, against
Pendleton and Thomas Lee. Pendleton proposed to take Blackstone for that
text, only purging him of what was inapplicable, or unsuitable to us. In
that case, the meaning of every word of Blackstone would have become
a source of litigation, until it had been settled by repeated legal
decisions. And to come at that meaning, we should have had produced, on
all occasions, that very pile of authorities from which it would be said
he drew his conclusion, and which, of course, would explain it, and
the terms in which it is couched. Thus we should have retained the same
chaos of law-lore from which we wished to be emancipated, added to the
evils of the uncertainty which a new text and new phrases would have
generated.
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