Adoption

Assuming that in adoption, as in emancipation, the person to whom the son was mancipated was called pater fiduciarius, we find in adoption three fathers in the field, pater naturalis, pater fiduciarius, and pater adoptivus.

To give a son in adoption, the first stage is three mancipations and two intervening manumissions, as in emancipation;

Minima est capitis deminutio, cum et ciuitas et libertas retinetur, sed status hominis commutatur;

’ I cannot doubt that the growing popularity of Adoption, as a method of obtaining a fictitious son, was due to moral dislike of the other modes of affiliation which was steadily rising among the Brahman teachers in the law-schools.

This familiarity with Adoption, during such a length of history, blinds us to the fact that it is one of the most violent of fictions.

Nowadays, if a man has no legitimate sons, he has no resource but adoption, either by himself or his widow, and there are local disputes whether the widow requires his consent or directions to be given before he dies, and if she requires it, in what form it should be given.

Further, it is surely not just that an adopted son should bring other sons into a family by adoption;

It was to guard against this that the lawgiver forbade a person who was himself adopted to create a son by adoption.

the law of Solon does not allow an adopted son even to dispose by will of the property in the family into which he comes by adoption.

If the system of archaic law at which we are looking be one which admits Adoption, we must add to the Agnates thus obtained all persons, male or female, who have been brought into the Family by the artificial extension of its boundaries.

Where the Potestas begins, Kinship begins;

Nevertheless the Irish Family undoubtedly received additions through Adoption.

there was the process of adoption, whereby any person whatever could become the legitimate son or daughter of the adoptive parents under certain legal forms.

Now, I would say the proper course to adopt—the course which will certainly be adopted in the future, when we are a little wiser than now—would be to revive the ancient process of adoption, but without any of the restrictions imposed by the ancient law of Rome, or the very highly civilised law of France.

that is to say, by publicly registering his willingness to admit the paternity of the unborn child of a certain woman,—and this is marriage,—or by publicly registering the fact that he is the father of a child already born and living;