Reprint of the fifth edition, the final authorial edition of Cooley's most important work. It went through six editions by 1890 and was cited more often that any other legal text in the late nineteenth century. This classic legal commentary on the Constitution examines the construction of state constitutions and the enactment of laws and "ranks with Story among the foremost commentators on the Constitution." Walker, Oxford Companion to Law 288. Originally published: Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1883. "The most influential work ever published on American Constitutional law." --Edward Corwin, Constitutional Revolution 87 "Published as the Fourteenth Amendment was being ratified, the treatise, especially Cooley's chapter on the protection of property by the "due process" clause of state constitutions, gained immediate attention because of its substantive, rather than mere procedural, definition of due process. For Cooley, due process meant that the powers of government must be exercised in accord with the 'settled maxims' of the common law, especially its safeguards for the protection of individual rights. Cooley's common-law constitutionalism also protected individual liberty from arbitrary regulations that restricted rights 'in a manner before unknown to the law.' 'Established principles, ' not mere procedure, determined whether a legislative or administrative act was due process." -- American National Biography V: 415 THOMAS MCINTYRE COOLEY [1824-1898] was the most important American jurist of the late-nineteenth century. For twenty years he served as the leading justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. He was appointed by President Grover Cleveland to serve on the Interstate Commerce Commission, where he was the leading commissioner and set several important precedents for administrative process. He taught at Johns Hopkins University and was dean of the University of Michigan Law School. First issued in 1870, his edition of Blackstone, popularly known as "Cooley's Blackstone," was the standard American edition of the late nineteenth century. Some of his other works include A Treatise on the Law of Taxation (1876) and A Treatise on the Law of Torts (1878). Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan, founded in 1972, was named in his honor.