Henry James Sumner Maine Quotes

The Roman Code was merely an enunciation in words of the existing customs of the Roman people.

The Roman jurisprudence has the longest known history of any set of human institutions.

I guess law was always interesting to me because you deal with constants. I like to deal with constants, abstracts, constants and reason and ration, rational approaches to things. I don't know, I never really thought why I wanted to study law. But if you ask me whether I would do it again, absolutely.

I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.

Law builds upon and, I should like to claim, is one of the liberal arts. It uses words of persuasion and changing definitions for practical ends.

What I really like about law is that it's not an endless discourse like history or philosophy. In law, there comes a point where problems have to be solved, and cases decided.

The glorious uncertainty of the law was a thing well known and complained of, by all ignorant people, but all learned gentleman considered it as its greatest excellency.

Our lady the Common Law is a very wise old lady though she still has something to learn in telling what she knows.

The most celebrated system of jurisprudence known to the world begins, as it ends, with a Code.

Law is a formless mass of isolated decisions.

I'm not interested in culture; I'm interested in the law.

Law is largely crystallized custom.

The study of law is, after all, largely the study of history.

The common law of England has been laboriously built around a mythical figure—the figure of the reasonable man.

There is not, in the whole compass of human affairs, so noble a spectacle as that which is displayed in the progress of jurisprudence; where we may contemplate the cautious and unwearied exertion of a succession of wise men, through a long course of ages, withdrawing every case, as it arises, from the dangerous power of discretion, and subjecting it to inflexible rules.

The best [legal] codes extant, if malignantly criticized, will be found to furnish matter for censure in every page …

I grew up in a family where law was in the air we were breathing.

The laws of a nation form the most instructive portion of its history

Look at the history of civil laws in our world and the source from which they emerged, and you will see that the vast majority of them arose directly from, or where based in principle on, Roman Canon Law, or the laws of other religious origin. Sharia is another notable example.

Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries.

One precedent creates another and they soon accumulate and constitute law. What yesterday was a fact, today is doctrine.

Louisiana commenced her existence as a state under a code of laws differing from all the other states which were founded on the common law, in that its code, a new one, was founded mainly on the Civil Law and the Code Napoleon of France.

I have an affinity for the law. I like looking at the small type on contracts, and if I could have afforded law school, I probably would have gone.

It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.

The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.