Ancient Law. Its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas

And to this hour the Hindoo Customary Law in which some of the most curious features of primitive society are stereotyped makes almost all the rights of parsons and all the rules of succession hinge on the due solemnisation of fixed ceremonies at the dead man's funeral that is at every point where a breach occurs in the continuity of the family. [...] The literature of the heroic age discloses to us law in the germ under the " Themistes " and a little more developed in the conception of " Dike." The next stage which we reach in the history of jurisprudence is strongly marked and surrounded by the utmost interest. [...] The connection of ideas which caused the judgments of the patriarchal chieftain to be attributed to superhuman dictation still shows itself here and there in the claim of a divine origin for the entire body of rules or for certain parts of it but the progress of thought no longer permits the solution of particular disputes to be explained by supposing an extrhuman interposition. [...] jurisdiction and they therefore strongly resembled the allegations in the writs of the English Queen's Bench and Exchequer by which those courts contrived to usurp the jurisdiction of the Common Pleas :—the allegatiori that the defendant was in custody of the king's marshal or that the plaintiff was the king's debtor and could not pay his debt by reason of the defendant's default. [...] Legislation the enactments of a legislature which whether it take the form of an autocratic prince or of a parliamentary assembly is the assumed organ of the entire society is the last of the ameliorating instrumentalities.