---
title: "William Blackstone"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "William Blackstone"
aliases: ["Sir William Blackstone"]
first_seen: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["pious perjury","[[entity-bloody-code|Bloody Code]]","jury nullification","Old Bailey Proceedings Online","[[entity-grand-larceny|grand larceny]]"]
---


Eighteenth-century English jurist whose *Commentaries on the Laws of England* (Book IV, ch. 17, c.1769) is the vault's primary textual anchor for the "pious perjury" cluster: two independent sessions (2026-07-12, 2026-07-25) have each fetched the Avalon Project's full-text digitization directly and confirmed, in his own words, that he used the phrase for juries who undervalue stolen goods to spare a defendant the gallows. He matters to this vault specifically because a named coinage and a load-bearing quantitative example both needed his own text rather than a secondary retelling — and got it. Whether he was the first person ever to use the phrase, as opposed to an early and influential user of it, remains unsettled.

## References
- [[claim-georgian-juries-undervalued-stolen-goods-to-avoid-the-death-penalty]]
- [[claim-duglass-1750-old-bailey-case-cited-as-39-shilling-undervaluation]]
- [[claim-12-pence-grand-larceny-threshold-is-common-law-not-a-bloody-code-statute]]
- [[question-verify-blackstone-pious-perjury-coinage-and-jury-undervaluation]]