William Blackstone

According to Blackstone, in this seminal text first published in 1765, ‘eavesdroppers, or such as listen under walls or windows, or the eaves of a house, to hearken after discourse, and thereupon to frame slanderous and mischievous tales, are a common nuisance and presentable at the court-leet.’ This is certainly the most famous reference to the offence of eavesdropping in the common law tradition, but it is not the earliest. There are records of presentments to court from the fourteenth century, and in the fifteenth eavesdropping was one of the most frequently reported offences in local courts across England. By Blackstone’s time, prosecutions were already much rarer. But that didn’t stop the offence travelling in books like this one to Britain’s colonies, where it lay mostly dormant before being revived in the twentieth century in response to the emerging problem of wiretapping. In America, many states still prohibit so-called ‘electronic eavesdropping’. In Britain and Australia, the old common law offence has been abolished and laws governing privacy, surveillance and the use of listening devices now go by other names. Lawyers and pedants may be interested to know, however, that, in Victoria at least, it is possible that a statutory source of the old English offence has been preserved by virtue of the Statute of Westminster of 1275 (3 Edward I), currently in effect under the Imperial Acts Application Act 1980 (Vic).

Documentation