Next Monday is the 250th anniversary of the appointment of William Blackstone as the first Vinerian Professor of Law at Oxford University. Wilfrid Prest’s timely biography, William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, £29.99), is a valuable account of the life of the author of the Commentaries on the Laws of England, the first comprehensive and reliable guide to the common law, but who is otherwise unknown to recent generations.

Blackstone was unsuccessful as a barrister because of his inability as a public speaker, and he returned to All Souls College, Oxford, where he had a fellowship, to pursue an academic career. Legal studies in Oxford in the middle of the 18th century were far from taxing. Professors in the law faculty “had given up bothering either their students or themselves with lectures”, and formal examinations were said to be “no very serious ordeal”. (Some of my contemporaries in the 1970s had a similar experience.)

In 1753 Blackstone began a series of lectures, delivered in the Dining Hall at All Souls, that aimed to “lay down a general and comprehensive plan of the laws of England”. Students who wished to attend had to pay a fee, and Blackstone made a healthy profit. His success made him the obvious candidate to be the first Vinerian Professor, filling the chair endowed by Charles Viner, who had the qualities of being rich, eccentric and recently deceased, and who had left money for this purpose to repay Oxford University for unspecified “indiscretions there in his infancy”.

The first of the four volumes of the Commentaries was published in 1765. The structure and content followed the lectures. There was an overwhelmingly favourable response. His contemporaries were impressed. In Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Dr Johnson observed in 1776 that “in England, where so much money is to be got by the practice of the law, most of our writers upon it have been in practice; though Blackstone had not been much in practice when he published his Commentaries”. Blackstone returned to the Bar, his reputation as the Vinerian Professor ensuring a good flow of work. He served as a Member of Parliament, was appointed a judge in 1770 and died, aged 56, in 1780.

The conventional explanation of why so little has previously been written about Blackstone is that he was a very dull man. Professor Prest concedes that Blackstone’s life “was not saturated with drama or sensation”. He does his best to keep our attention, though even his skills as a biographer struggle to make interesting his subject’s unpublished early poems.

Prest faces two other difficulties. Many aspects of Blackstone’s “emotional life, friendships and domestic relationships as a husband and father are more or less hidden from view”. And his subject was not a very nice man. Blackstone was irritable, arrogant and sensitive to apparent slights. A solicitor, William Bray, described his judicial personality as “sour, morose and imperious”, and recalled a barristers’ strike at Bristol Assizes when Blackstone decided to start proceedings at 7am.

Blackstone spent much of his time supporting Oxford causes. He played an important role in reviving scholarly publishing at the university press. (It is appropriate that this volume is published by OUP.) On behalf of All Souls, he argued appeals, and wrote articles, against those who claimed “founder’s kin” fellowships as descendants of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury. He had limited success, though was no doubt satisfied when one such applicant, Richard Harvey, having secured a fellowship, was expelled from All Souls in 1752 for the “enormous crime” of “notorious fornication attended with divers aggravating circumstances”.

Prest describes Blackstone’s academic, barristerial and judicial careers with scholarly detail and insight. Though he has, perhaps, spent too long in the 18th century if he really believes that “then as now, loyal parliamentary-political service was a desirable if never absolutely essential qualification for would-be English judges”.

Blackstone’s reputation rests on the Commentaries, an influential statement of the principles of the common law. But the book has never recovered from the savage attack inflicted by Jeremy

Bentham who, as a 16-year-old student, had listened to Blackstone lecture in Oxford. Prest puts the opposing case fairly and powerfully, but his subject remains an “everything-as-it-should-be Blackstone”, as Bentham described him, struggling to defend the common law against justified criticisms of its complexity, delay and uncertainty. Prest’s achievement is to help us to understand why this legal Dr Pangloss was so satisfied that all is for the best in the best of all possible common law worlds.

The author is a practising barrister at Blackstone Chambers in the Temple and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

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