Which legal text helped Calpurnia learn to read?

The legal text that helped Calpurnia learn to read was Blackstone’s Commentaries.

In the novel, Calpurnia explains that Miss Buford taught her to read from Blackstone’s Commentaries, along with the Bible. The book is the fictional character’s unlikely primer and helps show that her literacy developed despite the limited educational opportunities available to Black people in Maycomb.

Blackstone’s Commentaries refers to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, a four-volume explanation of English common law published between 1765 and 1769. It was written for accessibility as well as for legal study, and it became influential in both Britain and the American colonies.

The title is easy to mix up with Magna Carta or the Federalist Papers, but those are different works: Magna Carta is a medieval charter, while the Federalist Papers are eighteenth-century essays supporting ratification of the United States Constitution. Calpurnia’s book is specifically Blackstone’s legal treatise.