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Wikipedia

John Fortescue Aland, 1st Baron Fortescue of Credan (7 March 1670 – 19 December 1746) was an English lawyer, judge and politician. He was also a writer on English legal and constitutional history, and was said to have influenced Thomas Jefferson.


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An 1800 stipple engraving of Fortescue Aland by Silvester Harding in the collection of The Royal Society. Fortescue Aland was elected a Fellow of the Society in 1712.




John Fortescue Aland, 1st Baron Fortescue of Credan - Wikiwand

John Fortescue Aland, 1st Baron Fortescue of Credan (7 March 1670 – 19 December 1746), of Stapleford Abbots, Essex, was an English lawyer, judge and politician who sat in the House of Commons for two years from 1715 to 1717. He wrote on English legal and constitutional history, and was said to have influenced Thomas Jefferson. A member of both the Middle Temple and Inner Temple, he became a King's Counsel in 1714 and was then appointed Solicitor General, first to the Prince of Wales (later George II) and then to his father George I in 1715. After a short stint as a Member of Parliament, Fortescue Aland was knighted and elevated to the Bench as a Baron of the Exchequer in 1717. He was subsequently a justice of the Court of King's Bench (1718–1727) and of the Court of Common Pleas (1728–1746), save for a brief hiatus between 1727 and 1728 which has been attributed to George II's displeasure with one of his legal opinions.
In 1714 Fortescue Aland produced a volume entitled The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Government based on a manuscript in the Bodleian Library by his distant ancestor Sir John Fortescue (c. 1394 – c. 1480), to which he added an extended preface. It has been said that this is the earliest work in English on constitutional history. Jefferson referred to Fortescue Aland's views in the 1719 edition of this work, and in another preface by Fortescue Aland to a collection of judicial decisions which he edited, entitled Reports of Select Cases in All the Courts of Westminster-Hall (1748).