Ancient Law

Henry Sumner Maine published this in 1861 and changed the way lawyers and historians talk about their own subject. Rather than treat law as a set of timeless principles, he read Roman law, the Hindu codes and the early Germanic codes as evidence of how societies actually think, arguing that legal ideas grow out of family, kinship and religion long before anyone writes them down. The book gave us the famous formula that progressive societies have moved from status to contract, meaning a person’s rights stop being fixed by birth and start being made by agreement. Later scholars have corrected plenty of the detail, but the questions Maine raised founded comparative jurisprudence. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.