Bøker av Henry Sumner Maine

In this fascinating book, Henry Sumner Maine demonstrates how legal principles dating back to Ancient Rome evolved and permeated the modern legal system and society of the United States.A superb investigation of the roots of law ranging across thousands of years, this work uncovers resemblances between the government of the United States and the government of Ancient Rome. In particular the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are shown to have heavily derived from the Roman Jus Gentium - 'Law of the people'. At the time Maine published his analysis, the United States had already demonstrated vast differences across its regions and geography. The American Civil War in particular advertised divisions in the population. The author draws parallels between the localities of North America, and the wide-ranging cultures and peoples that populated the Roman Empire, noting that the federal legal system of both societies is a standard effectively applied to such vast, disparate areas.

This hugely influential work of 1861 is probably the one for which Sir Henry Maine (1822-88) is best remembered. Appointed Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge when he was only twenty-five, Maine then became Reader in Roman law and jurisprudence at the Council of Legal Education, which had been established in London in 1852 by the Inns of Court, and combined this post with research and journalism. He was interested in the relationship between the law and the society that both shaped it and consented to be regulated by it, and drew on historical examples from the culture of many Indo-European societies to further his arguments on the development of law as a vital component of civilisation. Published at a time when the evolution of institutions as well as of species was a topic of widespread interest, this remains a landmark work in the intellectual history of legal studies.