Formative Influences of Legal Development - Tapa dura

Reseña del editor

For the statement of the purpose of this series of volumes, we refer again to the preface of Volume I. I. The first volume aimed to set out concrete examples and evidences of law and legal institutions as found in ancient general literature, modern observations of retarded societies, the monuments of ancient laws and codes, and in ancient legal documents. So far as was feasible the materials there selected fall either under the category of aiicient or )riniltive. These terms, of course, are not convertible either in the law or elsewhere. What is ancient wmay, or may not, be primitive; and what is primitive may, or may not, be ancient. The preponderance of interest for the student of historical jurisprudence lies in what is primitive, rather than in what is only ancient; but the probability that ancient laws and codes contain a residue of greater or less bul Fof rudimentary legal ideas, we believe supports the combination of the ancient and the primitive in a general survey of legal evolution; .and such combination has the distmct advantage of giving a dual basis of comparison in the study of developing legal ideas. On the same point, it may also be said that for the purposes which we have had in view, a logical separation of strictly primitive materials from such as show development, and even a high order of development, of legal ideas, would hardly have been practicable. The peoples and laws represented therefore range through various stages of legal and social condition, from the Australian tribes or Seri Indians at one pole to the Babylonians or Egyptians on the other. The sources of ancient and primitive law are to be found not only in the three primary classes represented in the first volume; namely, (i) ancient literature, (ii) modern observations of retarded peoples, and (iii) the records of ancient laws and legal transactions ;but valuable informatio
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)