Blackstone's ratio

In criminal law, Blackstone's ratio (also known as Blackstone's formulation) is the idea that: as expressed by the English jurist William Blackstone in his seminal work Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in the 1760s. The idea subsequently became a staple of legal thinking in Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions and continues to be a topic of debate. There is also a long pre-history of similar sentiments going back centuries in a variety of legal traditions. The message that government and the courts must err on the side of bringing in verdicts of innocence has remained constant. In Blackstone's Commentaries The phrase, repeated widely and usually in isolation, comes from a longer passage, the fourth in a series of five discussions of policy by Blackstone: