Kent’s Commentaries
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Description
James Kent (1763–1847) was the nation’s most influential jurist between Independence and the Civil War. His life spanned the American Revolution, constitution making, the formative years of the new nation, and its aggressive western expansion to the Pacific Ocean. As a lawyer, judge, and treatise writer, Kent participated directly and indirectly in several aspects of this crucial phase of American nation-building. He entered Yale College one year after the Declaration of Independence. The war repeatedly interrupted his studies, but he continued to read on his own. During one break, he devoured the fourth volume of Sir William Blackstone’s recently published Commentaries on the Laws of England. The highlight of that volume is an essay on “the rise, progress, and gradual improvements of the laws of England.” Kent accepted entirely Blackstone’s thesis that English law was constantly improving, and he believed that English law was the bedrock of American law. For the rest of his life he sought to participate in what he called a transatlantic “republic of letters” and to contribute to a common Anglo-American project of articulating the best legal principles. “Best,” for Kent, meant those legal principles that integrated the states together as a nation, and the nation into the surrounding Atlantic world. Kent served on the New York Supreme Court from 1798 to 1813, the last seven years as its chief justice, and then became the state’s chancellor, its highest judicial officer, from 1814 to 1823. During that quarter century on the bench he published hundreds of opinions in more than twenty volumes of reports. When the state’s first official reporter failed to meet his standards, he nominated the replacement, a friend who served alongside Kent for twenty years. Upon his forced retirement at age sixty, Kent began lecturing at Columbia, something he had first tried briefly in the 1790s, and he commenced a national consulting practice. His son suggested that Kent publish his Columbia law lectures, and they became the core of his Commentaries on American Law, undoubtedly the best-selling law book—and one of the best-selling books of any sort—in nineteenth-century America. The first edition appeared in four volumes between 1826 and 1830. Kent was editing the sixth edition at the time that he died. It served as a civics text for college students, a primer for law students, and a handy resource for practitioners. Consequently, American judges cited the Commentaries regularly. In time, so too did judges in the common law world outside the United States because Kent became the most-cited American judge in the courts of nineteenth-century Great Britain.
Source Publication
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Political and Legal History
Source Editors/Authors
Donald T. Critchlow, Philip R. VanderMeer
Publication Date
2012
Volume Number
1
Recommended Citation
Hulsebosch, Daniel J., "Kent’s Commentaries" (2012). Faculty Chapters. 907.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/907
