Word.ws English Dictionary

Blackstone's ratio

Blackstone's ratio proper noun: the ratio of guilty people who go unpunished by the law to innocent people who are unjustly convicted.

Proper noun

Blackstone's ratio

  1. The ratio of guilty people who go unpunished by the law to innocent people who are unjustly convicted.

Origin of Blackstone's ratio

After the English jurist William Blackstone, who wrote, "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

Questions about Blackstone's ratio

What does Blackstone's ratio mean?
Blackstone's ratio means the ratio of guilty people who go unpunished by the law to innocent people who are unjustly convicted.
What part of speech is Blackstone's ratio?
Blackstone's ratio is a proper noun.

Words near Blackstone's ratio in the dictionary

  1. Blackstocks
  2. Blackston
  3. Blackstone
  4. Blackstone Heights
  5. Blackstone River
  6. Blackstone's ratio
  7. Blackstonian
  8. Blackstons
  9. blackstrap
  10. blackstraps
  11. blackstream

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Blackstone's ratio (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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