Henry James Sumner Maine Quotes

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

The ancient Roman code belongs to a class of which almost every civilised nation in the world can show a sample, and which, so far as the Roman and Hellenic worlds were concerned, were largely diffused over them at epochs not widely distant from one another.

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.

Law is largely crystallized custom.

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

They had to make their own laws in accordance with the necessities of time, and circumstances, the state of affairs, and the experience of judges.

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.

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

Common law is common right.

Our common law is the stock instance of a combination of custom and its successive adaptations.

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.

The Constitution is not the only way we preserve rights in America. We have the common law and political action.

Almost all law in the United States is State law.