The Commentaries were written after a period in the author's life, when, by the laws of his native State, his mental powers were supposed to be impaired by reason of his great age, and to render him unfit for duly performing his judicial duties, and to the existence of that provision we are probably indebted for the work.
Scarcely nothing, and a comparison of other titles in the two works shows the American author to have surpassed his rival in comprehensiveness of research, and fulness of illustration, and to have equalled him in clearness and cogency of reasoning.
He does not scruple to use the learning of other writers when to his purpose, which reappears with the additional outpourings of his own well stored mind, and his criticisms upon their merits are judicious and highly instructive, as denoting the several sources and the value of the information to be derived from them.
It is scarcely necessary to add, what is so well known, that the American Commentaries is a text book of the highest character for accuracy, that it is a work which no lawyer thinks of doing without, and that its reputation and usefulness is not wholly confined to the United States.
From the nature of the work, Chancellor Kent was only able to devote a small portion of his treatise to the Law of Nations; but their brevity is the only thing that is objectionable in these lectures, for all that the author does give us is valuable."
Mr. Robertson says: "We have learned the respect that is due to Professor Kent, the late Chancellor of the State of New York, author of the Commentaries on American Law, a name probably not inferior, as a legal writer, to any of the present day."
The venerable author has not been an inattentive observer of the progressive changes and developments of the law, since the first publication of his Commentaries, as will appear by an examination of the successive editions, each of which contains somewhat that is not in its predecessor.