Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Careful With Those Corrections:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_02_22-2009_02_28.shtml#1235420929
A commenter faults my quoting Blackstone's "The falsehood of it may
aggravate it�s guilt, and enhance it�s punishment":
"it�s" = "its" in standard English, and also in the [1]original,
according to Google Books.
Many people do take the view that modern standard English is Good Old
English, and that usages that are seen as erroneous today are some
modern inventions. (I don't know if that's the commenter's general
view, but I have heard many people express such arguments.) But while
"it's" as a possessive of "it" is indeed not standard in edited
English prose today -- perhaps it will be one day, but to my knowledge
it's not so right now -- it appears to have been standard in the past.
The Blackstone quote is one example, but the OED offers several
others, including from Shakespeare; the latest such source the OED
gives is 1802, which suggests that the usage was pretty standard at
least until then.
But what about the commenter's assertion that the original actually
says "its"? The trouble is that the source the commenter cites is
actually not the original. I looked up the original 1769 Oxford
edition in Eighteenth Century Collections Online (the Commentaries
were published starting with 1765, but volume 4 has a publication date
of 1769), and it says "it's." So don't assume that what would be
generally seen as an error today would also have been seen as an error
in the 1760s, and don't let this assumption fool you into treating
early 1900s editions as authoritative about the "original" spelling.
References
1.
http://books.google.com/books?id=FwU9AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA1550&vq=%22the+falsehood+of+it%22&dq=%22The+direct+tendency+of+these+libels+is+the+breach+of+the+public+peace%22&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0
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