Introduction to Law

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III 20 TEE EXPANSION OP THE COMMON LAW I. THE FOUNDATIONS OF JUSTICE The jurisprudence of the Western world is divided, for all practical purposes, between Germanic and Romanic law. Not that there is any such thing as an actual system of law derived wholly fron Germanic or wholly from Roman...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III 20 TEE EXPANSION OP THE COMMON LAW I. THE FOUNDATIONS OF JUSTICE The jurisprudence of the Western world is divided, for all practical purposes, between Germanic and Romanic law. Not that there is any such thing as an actual system of law derived wholly fron Germanic or wholly from Roman sources; but there is no system whose formal structure is not, in the main, built on the one or the other of these foundations; unless indeed we ought to consider the la-.v very recently established by the Civil Code of the German Empire as making a new departure in modern national jurisprudence. We may be allowed, in any case, to speak in the present tense, for historical purposes, of things as the;'' were down to the close of the nineteenth century. Subject to this caution, it is generally true that the Continental nations of Western and Central Europe and the inhabitants of the colonies settled by them live under forms which, however modified by custom and recast in the codes of a more scientific age, are still those of Roman law. The Scandinavian lands are the only clear exception. Scandinavian law- goes with the Germanic groupj so does the isolated ana very inter- eating system of Scottish law, notwithstanding that it put on a Konan face by a reception of Roman law and terminology, which ia now know to have been late and superficial. The principal member of this group is, I need hardly say, the Common Law; the law of England carried around the world by English settlers, and now prevailing (with local modifications but with the same general principles) throughout the English-speaking parts of the British Empire beyond seas, the whole of the United States, except, I believe, one jurisdiction, and to a considerable extent, though partially and indirectly, in British India. ...