-Court of Quarter Sessions.- -The Court of the BLACKSTONE ECONOMIZED. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. IMPORTANCE OF A GENERAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE LAWS OF ENGLAND.. THERE are few studies more important to Englishmen than that of the Law, and yet the science of the Laws and Constitution of our country—those legal and equitable rules of action by which the meanest individual is protected from the insults and oppression of the greatest-is a species of knowledge in which Englishmen are remarkably deficient. Again, a general knowledge of the Constitution of their country, which has been built upon the soundest foundations, approved by the experience of ages, and now made the exemplar or model for the constitutions of most of the European nations, as well as of the newly constituted governments of our colonies, has also been a defect in the education of Englishmen. These subjects, too, are such as no class in the realm ought to be indifferent to, for it is incumbent upon every man to be acquainted with those rules of conduct with which he is immediately concerned, lest he suffer for his ignorance, and incur the censure as well as inconvenience of living in society without being aware of the obligations which the law imposes. For example, every man possessed of landed property, of whatever extent or value, is primarily interested in a knowledge of the leading principles of the law relating to estates and conveyances, as a guard against fraud and imposition. Besides, the policy of all laws has made some forms necessary in the wording of wills as to the bequests of real and personal estates, and the manner of attesting them, an ignorance of which must always be of dangerous consequences. A knowledge of these forms may also be of considerable use to medical men, called in, as they sometimes are, suddenly to a patient in a dangerous state, when they may assist in giving a right direction to a testator's intentions as to the disposition of his property. Those who attend our courts of justice are witnesses of the confusion and distress often occasioned in families, and of the difficulties that arise in discerning the true meaning of a testator, or sometimes in discovering any meaning at all in that which he has written, so that in the end, his property often passes away contrary to his intentions, because he has omitted one or two formal words which are necessary to ascertain the sense with indisputable legal precision, or has not executed his will in the presence of such witnesses as the law requires. m A very large portion of the community are liable to be called upon to establish the rights, to estimate the injuries, to weigh the accusations, and sometimes to dispose of the lives of their fellow-subjects, by serving upon juries. In this situation they have frequently to decide, and that upon their oaths, questions of great importance, in the solution of which some legal knowledge is required, especially where the law and the fact, as it often happens, are intimately blended together. In Blackstone's time the general incapacity of juries to do this |