Sir William Blackstone

English jurist and the first Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford (1758), later a judge on the Court of Common Pleas. His four-volume Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765 to 1769) was the first attempt to present the whole of English common law as a coherent, teachable system rather than a mass of case reports, and was read closely by the American Founders, cited routinely by early United States courts as an authority on what the common law provided.