Since the year 1798, the decisions of Sir William Scott, (now Lord Stowell) on the admiralty side of Westminster Hall, have been read and admired in every region of the republic of letters, as models of the most cultivated and the most enlightened human reason.James Kent, Commentaries on American Law Vol. 2, (New York: O. Halsted 1827), 526.
Chancellor Kent's single, luminous sentence, published while Sir William Scott was still on the bench, presents the questions this article will explore. It investigates two interrelated aspects of the trajectory of the first decade of Sir William Scott's admiralty judgments: the history of their nearly simultaneous publication on both sides of the Atlantic and dissemination into the transnational “republic of letters” and the circumstances of their immediate absorption as precedents into the jurisprudence of the United States.