Foreword: The legacy of St. George Tucker.

AuthorDouglas, Davison M.

St. George Tucker was one of the more influential jurists, legal scholars, and legal educators of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America. (1) The purpose of this symposium is to examine the impact of Tucker's legal work on the development of American law and its importance

to contemporary scholars and courts in understanding the contours of legal thought in the early national period.

Born in Bermuda in 1752, Tucker migrated to Virginia in 1772 to study at The College of William and Mary. (2) After a brief tenure at the College, Tucker read law under the direction of Williamsburg attorney George Wythe, one of the most eminent lawyers in the American colonies and a mentor to many prominent young men, including Thomas Jefferson. (3) Because of the onset of the American Revolution, in which Tucker served as a member of the Virginia militia, Tucker did not begin his law practice until 1782. He quickly became one of Virginia's leading lawyers, and in 1788, the state legislature appointed him to a position on the recently reorganized General Court. Tucker served as a judge on the General Court until 1804, when the state legislature elevated him to a seat on the Virginia Court of Appeals. Tucker resigned from the Court of Appeals in 1811, but President James Madison appointed him to the federal district court in Virginia in 1813, a position he held until 1824. Although Tucker was one of the most distinguished jurists of his day, the presence of two Virginians on the United States Supreme Court--Chief Justice John Marshall and Associate Justice Bushrod Washington--likely deprived him of the chance to serve on the nation's highest court. (4)

In addition to his judicial career, Tucker made his mark as an important legal scholar and educator. In 1790, Tucker succeeded Wythe, becoming the second law professor at The College of William and Mary, carrying out his duties between court terms and serving until 1804. (5) Although he would eventually be eclipsed in prominence by Joseph Story and James Kent, (6) Tucker was the most significant legal scholar of the early nineteenth century, particularly after publication of his five-volume edition of William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England in 1803. (7)

Blackstone's Commentaries, the most authoritative eighteenth-century text on English law, was published in England between 1765 and 1769. (8) First published in America in 1771, with subsequent republication in 1790 and 1799, Blackstone's Commentaries soon became the most widely read legal text in late-eighteenth-century America--essential reading for any aspiring lawyer. (9) But each of the American editions of Blackstone was merely a reprint of Blackstone's original work; none offered any consideration of the extent to which American law differed from English law. (10)

Tucker's Blackstone took an entirely different course. While serving as a law professor at The College of William and Mary during the 1790s, Tucker had his students read Blackstone, but he supplemented that reading with lectures in which he analyzed the ways that law in the United States--and specifically, Virginia--had departed from English legal principles as a result of the American Revolution, the Virginia Constitution, and the United States Constitution. (11) These lectures were "the first systematic effort by any figure in American law to describe the contours of the new system created by the amended Constitution." (12) Drawing extensively on his William and Mary lectures, Tucker's Blackstone included eight hundred pages of essays on a variety of legal and political topics and more than one thousand footnotes in which Tucker examined Blackstone in light of American and Virginian law. (13) Tucker worried about the effect Blackstone's Tory sensibilities might have on his students. (14) He thus emphasized to his students that the American Revolution and its aftermath had produced a revolution "not only in the principles of our government," but in a variety of legal principles, such as the law of inheritance, that reflected the new nation's republican values and that rendered Blackstone an unreliable guide to certain aspects of American law. (15)

Tucker's edition of Blackstone's Commentaries, known as "America's Blackstone," soon became the leading legal text in the United States, enjoying wide circulation throughout the country. (16) Indeed, Tucker's Blackstone, the first major legal treatise on American law, was one of the most influential legal works of the early nineteenth century and the most comprehensive treatise on American constitutional law until around 1820. (17) Not surprisingly, it was also one of the legal texts most frequently cited by the United States Supreme Court and relied upon by lawyers appearing before the Court during the first few decades of the nineteenth century. (18) As Saul Cornell notes in his contribution to this symposium, "Tucker was one of the leading legal thinkers of the Founding Era, and his magisterial study of Blackstone's Commentaries was an influential work of constitutional theory that helped shape the terms of constitutional discourse in the early republic." (19) Because Tucker wrote many of the essays that appeared in his edition of Blackstone during the early 1790s, and was quite familiar with the ratification controversy and the contemporary debates over the Bill of Rights, his essays on the Constitution offer a fascinating eighteenth-century perspective on the meaning of our...

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