Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Sources of Ancient and Primitive Law, Vol. 1
The department of legal history deals with particulars, with the special and concrete details of a legal system; while the field of historical jurisprudence is universals, the general and abstract phases of legal evolution. This collection of readings does not aim to present the sequences of facts attached to the names of men, places, and things, necessary (as is now, perhaps, almost universally admitted) to an understanding of legal rules as they obtain here or there but is intended as an exposition of the law (to use the language of Mr. Justice Holmes) as a great anthropological document. Therefore these volumes properly will be classified on the side of what is thus, somewhat vaguely, called historical jurisprudence or legal ethnology.
We need not insist too much upon. The claim that an acquaint ance with the anthropology of the law has a direct, tangible, and quantitative bearing on the isolated manifestations of the law as expressed in the daily con?icts of practical life. Nor yet would we disparage the thought that a general survey of the course of legal evolution has a measurable qualitative rela tion to the complex, and, at times, discordant play of modern legal phenomena, at least for those who looking into the vessel of life re?ect that the Eternal Saki from that bowl has poured millions of bubbles like us, and will pour. Moreover, to ad vocate such study on the ground of the creation or discovery of a new discipline will fail to persuade; there are already disciplines enough. And, again, an appeal to the informative value of this learning, while the easiest method of justification for a prevailing curiosity into what is strange and bizarre, 1s not the claim which this undertaking prefers to support.
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