Roman Law

The necessity of taking the Roman Law as a typical system has compelled the Author to draw from it what may appear a disproportionate number of his illustrations;

Still less can Maine be censured for having adopted, at the time, current views of the highest authorities in Roman legal history which have since been abandoned.

First, in Roman law Savigny, then still living, was the person of greatest authority;

The inevitable result was that the French feudal Courts dwindled into bodies which confided all active duties to a small committee of experts, and as these experts were for the most part devotees of the Roman law, they exercised memorable influence in diffusing notions of the absolute power of the King, and specially of his rightful authority over justice.

What has descended to so large a part of the modern world is not the coarse Roman law, but the Roman law distilled through the jurisdiction of the Prætor, and by him gradually bent into supposed accordance with the law of Nature.

The Roman law gained everywhere a considerable, and here and there a complete, ascendency over ancient custom, and the French Civil Code, the outcome of the Revolution, is only a version of Roman jurisprudence.

The Roman Law has never ceased to be spoken of with deep respect, and it is in fact the source of the greatest part of the rules by which civil life is still governed in the Western World.

Let it be remembered that the Roman Law, which, next to the Christian Religion, is the most plentiful source of the rules governing actual conduct throughout Western Europe, is descended from a small body of Aryan customs reduced to writing in the fifth century before Christ, and known as the Twelve Tables of Rome.

The Family under Patria Potestas was, with the Pater-Familias, the true Roman Family.

Temerity is taken from the Roman law.

But since, when our truth meets every charge, the authority of the laws is at last set up against it — so that either it is said that nothing can be reconsidered once the laws have spoken, or the necessity of obedience is, however reluctantly, preferred to truth — I will first join issue with you about the laws, as with the guardians of the laws.

Were not the very laws of Lycurgus, amended by the Lacedaemonians, the cause of so much grief to their author that he passed sentence on himself, in seclusion, by starvation?

Do you not yourselves daily, as experience sheds light on the darkness of antiquity, hew down and cut away that whole old and squalid forest of laws with the new axes of imperial rescripts and edicts?

A heartless woman-flirt perhaps, deserves also to be punished as the Roman law permitted the forcible violation of a prostitute.