Theater of the Invisible
Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh Book the Second. Chapter the Third. Of Incorporeal Hereditaments. Blackstone isn’t famous for making something out of nothing, but for giving a new twist to...
William Blackstone
The Symbols of Property
Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh Book II. Chapter the second. Of REAL PROPERTY; and, first, of CORPOREAL HEREDITAMENTS. This chapter is about things that last. Blackstone’s property law is obsessed with...
Money Talks
Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh Blackstone Weekly needs to pause to mark the moment. The last post of 2010 (on corporations, death and the Second Circuit’s provocative Kiobel decision) completed Volume I...
For Christine
Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh BOOK I. Chapter the eighteenth. Of CORPORATIONS. This chapter is about death — and the attempt to outlaw it. Blackstone puts it right out there in his first...
Now you see it, now you don’t
Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh Book the First. Chapter the seventeenth. Of GUARDIAN and WARD. This is a small chapter about a big and vexing subject. The very word “guardian” fills me with...
Mysteries of Parenthood
Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh Chapter the sixteenth. Of PARENT and CHILD. This chapter is about “the most universal relation in nature.” (p. 434) My nine-year-old universal relation climbed into bed with...
A Marrying Kind
Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh BOOK THE FIRST. Chapter the Fifteenth. Of HUSBAND and WIFE. This chapter about marriage begins by drawing a line: “Our law considers marriage in no other light...
Warriors and Avatars
Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh BOOK I. Chapter the thirteenth. Of the MILITARY and MARITIME STATES. This chapter is about soldiers, or, “such persons as are peculiarly appointed among the rest of...
Totems of Our Lives
Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh BOOK THE FIRST: Chapter the twelfth. Of the CIVIL STATE. This chapter’s subject is “[t]hat part of the nation which . . includes all orders of men,...
Law Makes the World
Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh BOOK I. Chapter the Eleventh. Of the CLERGY. Just when I was thinking that there wasn’t a single point of interest in this chapter’s dry taxonomy of...