Purchase of this book includes free trial access to
www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books
for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A
Sketch of English Legal History CHAPTER I Early English Law,
600-1066 A.d. Legal History. When we speak of a body of law, we use
a metaphor so apt that it is hardly a metaphor. We picture to
ourselves a being that lives and grows, that preserves its identity
while every atom of which it is composed is subject to a ceaseless
process of change, decay, and renewal. At any given moment of
time?for example, in the present year?it may, indeed, seem to us
that our legislators have, and freely exercise, an almost boundless
power of doing what they will with the laws under which we live;
and yet we know that, do what they may, their work will become an
organic part of an already existing system. Continuity of English
Law. Already, if we lookback at the ages which are the most famous
in the history of English legislation?the age of Bentham and the
radical reform, the age which appropriated the gains that had been
won but not secured under the rule of Cromwell, the age of Henry
VIII., the age of Edward I. ("our English Justinian ")?it must seem
to us that, for all their activity, they changed, and could change,
but little in the great body of law which they had inherited from
their predecessors. Hardly a rule remains unaltered, and yet the
body of law that now lives among us is the same body that
Blackstone described in the eighteenth century, Coke in the
seventeenth, Littleton in the fifteenth, Bracton in the thirteenth,
Glanvill in the twelfth. This continuity, this identity, is very
real to us if we know that for the last seven hundred years all the
judgments of the courts at Westminster have been recorded, and that
for the most part they can still be read.' Were the world large
enough to contain such a book, we might publish not merely a
biography,but a journal or diary, of E...
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
