Sir Henry James Sumner Maine, KCSI (15 August

1822 – 3 February 1888), was a British comparative

jurist and historian. He is famous for the thesis outlined

in Ancient Law that law and society developed "from

status to contract."[1] According to the thesis, in the

ancient world individuals were tightly bound by status to

traditional groups, while in the modern one, in which

individuals are viewed as autonomous agents, they are

free to make contracts and form associations with

whomever they choose. Because of this thesis, Maine

can be seen as one of the forefathers of

modern sociology of law.

Contents

  [hide] 

1 Early life 2 In India 3 Oxford professor 4 Death 5 Works

o 5.1 Selected publicationso 5.2 Articles

6 See also 7 Gallery 8 References 9 Further reading

10 External links

Early life[edit]

Maine was the son of Dr. James Maine,

of Kelso, Roxburghshire. He was educated at Christ's

Hospital, where a boarding house was named after him

in 1902. From there he went up to Pembroke College,

Cambridge, in 1840. At Cambridge, he was noted as a

classical scholar and also won the Chancellor's Gold

Medal for poetry in 1842.[2] He won a Craven scholarship

and graduated as senior classic in 1844, being also

senior chancellor's medallist in classics.[3]

Shortly afterwards, he accepted a tutorship at Trinity

Hall. In 1847, he was appointed regius professor of civil

law, and he was called to the bar three years later; he

held this chair till 1854. Meanwhile, in 1852 he had

become one of the readers appointed by the Inns of

Court.

In India[edit]

The post of legal member of council in India was offered

to Maine; he declined it once, on grounds of health. The

following year Maine was persuaded to accept, and it

turned out that India suited him much better than

Cambridge or London. He was asked to prolong his

services beyond the regular term of five years, and he

returned to England in 1869.

The subjects on which it was Maine's duty to advise the

government of India were as much political as legal.

They ranged from such problems as the land settlement

of the Punjab, or the introduction of civil marriage to

provide for the needs of unorthodox Hindus, to the

question of how far the study of Persian should be

required or encouraged among European civil servants.

Plans of codification were prepared, and largely shaped,

under Maine's direction, which were implemented by his

successors, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen and Dr

Whitley Stokes.

Maine became a member of the secretary of state's

council in 1871, and remained so for the rest of his life.

In the same year he was gazetted a K.C.S.I.

Oxford professor[edit]

In 1869, Maine was appointed to the chair of historical

and comparative jurisprudence newly founded in

the University of Oxford by Corpus Christi College.

Residence at Oxford was not required, and the election

amounted to an invitation to the new professor to resume

and continue in his own way the work he had begun

in Ancient Law.

In 1877, the mastership of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where

Maine had formerly been tutor, became vacant. There

were two strong candidates whose claims were so nearly

equal that it was difficult to elect either; the difficulty was

solved by a unanimous invitation to Maine to accept the

post. His acceptance entailed the resignation of the

Oxford chair, though not continuous residence at

Cambridge. Ten years later, he was elected to

succeed Sir William Harcourt as Whewell Professor of

International Law at Cambridge.

Death[edit]

Maine's health, which had never been strong, gave way

towards the end of 1887. He went to the Riviera under

medical advice, and died at Cannes, France, on 3

February 1888. He left a wife, Jane, and two sons, of

whom the elder died soon afterwards.

Works[edit]

Maine wrote journalism in 1851 for the Morning

Chronicle, edited by John Douglas Cook. With Cook and

others, in 1855, he then founded and edited

the Saturday Review, writing for it to 1861.[4] Like his

close friend James Fitzjames Stephen, he enjoyed

occasional article-writing, and never quite abandoned it.

Maine contributed to the Cambridge Essays an essay on

Roman law and legal education, republished in the later

editions of Village Communities. Lectures delivered by

Maine for the Inns of Court were the groundwork

of Ancient Law (1861), the book by which his reputation

was made at one stroke. Its object, as stated in the

preface, was "to indicate some of the earliest ideas of

mankind, as they are reflected in ancient law, and to

point out the relation of those ideas to modern thought."

He published the substance of his Oxford

lectures: Village Communities in the East and the

West (1871); Early History of Institutions (1875); Early

Law and Custom (1883). In all these works, the

phenomena of societies in an archaic stage are brought

into line to illustrate the process of development in legal

and political ideas (see freedom of contract).

As vice-chancellor of the University of Calcutta, Maine

commented on the results produced by the contact of

Eastern and Western thought. Three of these addresses

were published, wholly or in part, in the later editions

of Village Communities; the substance of others is in

the Rede lecture  of 1875, in the same volume. An essay

on India was his contribution to the composite work

entitled The Reign of Queen Victoria (editor Thomas

Humphry Ward, 1887).[5]

His brief work in international law is represented by the

posthumous volume International Law (1888). Maine had

published in 1885 his one work of speculative politics, a

volume of essays on Popular Government, designed to

show that democracy is not in itself more stable than any

other form of government, and that there is no necessary

connexion between democracy and progress.

In 1886, there appeared in the Quarterly Review (clxii.

181) an article on the posthumous work of J. F.

McLennan, edited and completed by his brother, entitled

'"The Patriarchal Theory". The article, though unsigned

by the rule of the Quarterly at the time, was Maine's reply

to the McLennan brothers' attack on the historical

reconstruction of the Indo-European family system put

forward in Ancient Law and supplemented in Early Law

and Custom. Maine charged McLennan in his theory of

primitive society with neglecting and misunderstanding of

the Indo-European evidence.

A summary of Maine's writings was in Sir Mountstuart

Grant Duff's memoir.

Selected publications[edit]

Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of

Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas, John

Murray, 1861.

Village-Communities in the East and West. Six

lectures delivered at Oxford, John Murray, 1871.

The Early History of the Property of Married Women:

As Collected from Roman and Hindoo Law: A Lecture,

Delivered at Birmingham, March 25, 1873, A. Ireland

and Co., 1873.

Early History of Institutions,  Henry Holt and Company,

1875.

Dissertations on Early Law and Custom: Chiefly

Selected from Lectures Delivered at Oxford, John

Murray, 1883.

Popular Government: Four Essays,  John Murray,

1885.

International Law: A Series of Lectures Delivered

Before the University of Cambridge, 1887, John

Murray, 1888.

Plato: A Poem,  Privately Printed, 1894.

Maine, Henry James Sumner

Henry Maine.LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Sir Henry James Sumner Maine was a leading nineteenth-century English jurist. Maine's writings on the social and historical bases of all legal systems have been recognized for their clarity of thought and style, although modern commentators have criticized Maine for overgeneralization.

Maine was born August 15, 1822, in Kelso, Scotland. In 1844, he graduated from Cambridge University, where he tutored until he was appointed to be a professor of Civil Law in 1847. He criticized Legal Education for teaching practical skills rather than the analysis of law as a science. His legal practice was limited, as he concentrated on publishing legal and political writings.

Maine first achieved prominence with the publication of Ancient Law in 1860. Ancient Lawtraced the historical development of law in the ancient world. Maine argued in

it that there are two types of societies: static and progressive. Static societies include most of the non-Western world. He believed that countries such as India and China were locked in an unchanging world, bound by a fixed legal condition dominated by family dependency. In those societies, laws had very limited application and were binding not on individuals but on families. The rule of conduct for the individual was the law of the home, as distinguished from civil law.

In contrast, Maine proposed, European societies were progressive, characterized by a desire to improve and to develop. In progressive societies, civil law grew as a greater number of personal and property rights were removed from the domestic forum to the public tribunal. Maine saw the distinguishing feature in this movement as the gradual dissolution of family dependency and its replacement by individual obligation—as a movement from personal conditions to agreement, from status to contract.

Maine believed that the modern legal order would make talent and ability more important than race, sex, or family in shaping personal status. His beliefs in the evolution of Western law, and progress in general, struck a chord in the Anglo-American legal community. His theories were attractive to those in the United States who saw a powerful national economy reshaping society and creating opportunity for those who were willing to take risks and to work hard.

"EXCEPT THE BLIND FORCES OF NATURE, NOTHING MOVES ON THIS WORLD WHICH IS NOT GREEK IN ITS ORIGIN."—HENRY MAINE

Maine took a hiatus from his professorship in 1863, to serve as a legal member of the Viceroy's Council in India for six years. Upon his return to England in 1869, he resumed his legal scholarship, publishing Village Communities in 1871, The Early History of Institutions in 1875, and Early Law and Custom in 1883. Maine's conclusions have been challenged over the past century. Historians and social scientists have pointed out that many of his interpretations are false and based on limited information. Despite these perceived shortcomings, Maine is still regarded as a seminal figure in Jurisprudence. His use of historical and anthropological methods was groundbreaking, and his strong conceptual framework helped to reshape the way in which legal developments are analyzed.

Maine died February 3, 1888, in Cannes, France.

Further readings

Cocks, Raymond. Sir Henry Maine: A Study in Victorian Jurisprudence. 1988. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Sir Paul Vinogradoff (Russian: Па́N вел Га́ври́N лови́ч

Ви́ногра́N дов, transliterated: Pavel Gavrilovich

Vinogradov; 18 November

1854(O.S.) in Kostroma, Russian Empire – 19 December

1925 in Paris, France) was a highly reputable Anglo-

Russian historian andmedievalist.

Contents

  [hide] 

1 Career 2 Books 3 Works

o 3.1 Othero 3.2 As editoro 3.3 Articles

4 Notes 5 References 6 Further reading

Career[edit]

He became professor of history at the University of

Moscow, but his zeal for the spread of education brought

him into conflict with the authorities, and consequently he

was obliged to leave Russia. Having settled in England,

Vinogradoff brought a powerful and original mind to bear

upon the social and economic conditions of early

England, a subject which he had already begun to study

in Moscow.[1]

In 1903 he was appointed Corpus professor of

jurisprudence in the University of Oxford, and

subsequently became a fellow of theBritish Academy. He

received honorary degrees from the principal

universities, was made a member of several foreign

academies and was appointed honorary professor

of history at Moscow.[1]

Books[edit]

Writing in 1911, the anonymous author of Vinogradoff's

biography in the Encyclopædia Britannica thought that

Vinogradoff's Villainage in England (1892) is perhaps the

most important book written on the peasantry of

the feudal age and the village community in England; it

can only be compared for value with FW

Maitland's Domesday Book  and Beyond. In masterly

fashion Vinogradoff here shows that

the villein of Norman times was the direct descendant of

the Anglo-Saxon freeman, and that the typical Anglo-

Saxon settlement was a free community, not a manor,

the position of the freeman having steadily deteriorated

in the centuries just around the Norman Conquest. The

status of the villein and the conditions of the manor in the

12th and 13th centuries are set forth with a legal

precision and a wealth of detail which shows its author,

not only as a very capable historian, but also as a

brilliant and learned jurist.[1]

The 1911 author thought that almost equally valuable

was Vinogradoff's essay on “Folkland” in vol. viii. of

the English Historical Review (1893), which proved for

the first time the real nature of this kind of land.

Vinogradoff followed up his Villainage in

England with The Growth of the Manor (1905)

and English Society in the Eleventh Century (1908),

works on the lines of his earlier book.[1]

In "Outlines in Historical Jurisprudence" (1920–22),

Vinogradoff traces the development of basic themes of

jurisprudence, including marriage, property, and

succession, in six different types of society: the

totemistic, the tribal, the ancient city state, the medieval

system of feudalism and canon law, and modern

industrial society.[1]

Works[edit]

The Origins of Feudal Relations in Lombard

Italy, 1880.

Villainage in England,  Carendon Press, [publ. 1887;

trans. to English 1892].

The Teaching of Sir Henry Maine: An Inaugural

Lecture, Henry Frowde, 1904.

The Growth of the Manor,  George Allen & Company,

1911 [1st Pub. 1905].

English Society in the Eleventh Century,  Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1908.

Roman Law in Medieval Europe,  Harper & Brothers,

1909.

Essays in Legal History Read Before the International

Congress of Historical Studies, held in London in

1913, Oxford University Press, 1913.

Common-sense in Law,  H. Holt and Company, 1914.

Self-government in Russia,  Constable, 1915.

Outlines in Historical Jurisprudence (Introduction and

Tribal Law), Oxford University Press, 1920.

Outlines in Historical Jurisprudence (The

Jurisprudence of the Greek City), Oxford University

Press, 1922.

Custom and Right, H. Aschehoug & Co., 1925.

The Collected Papers of Paul Vinogradoff, 2 Vol.,

Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1928.

Other[edit]

"The Reforming Work of Tzar Alexander II."  In

Kirkpatrick, F. A., Lectures on the History of the

Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press,

1902.

"Social and Economic Conditions of the Roman

Empire in the Fourth Century." In Gwatkin, H. M. The

Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. I, The MacMillan

Company, 1911.

"Foundations of Society (Origins of Feudalism)."  In

Gwatkin, H. H. The Cambridge Medieval History, Vol.

II, The MacMillan Company, 1913.

"Russian Culture."  In Bingham, Alfred. Handbook of

the European War, Vol. II, H. W. Wilson Company,

1914.

"Russia: The Psychology of a Nation,"  Oxford

Pamphlets, Oxford University Press, 1914.

The Russian Problem,  George H. Doran Co., 1914.

"The Task of Russia."  In Stephens, Winifred. The Soul

of Russia, Macmillan & Co., 1916.

"Magna Carta, C. 39. Nullus Liber Homo, etc."  In

Malden, Henry Elliot. Magna Carta Commemoration

Essays, Royal Historical Society, 1917.

"The Situation in Russia."  In The Reconstruction of

Russia, Oxford University Press, 1919.

"Introduction."  In Hübner, Rudolf. A History of

Germanic Private Law, Little, Brown & Company,

1918.

"The Work of Rome."  In Marvin, F. S. The Evolution of

Peace, Oxford University Press, 1921.

As editor[edit]

Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History,  Vol. IV,

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914.

Articles[edit]

"The Customs of Ragusa,"  The Law Quarterly

Review, Vol. XXI, 1905.

"Magna Carta,"  The Law Quarterly Review, Vol. XXI,

1905.

"A Constitutional History of Hungary,"  The Law

Quarterly Review, Vol. XXI, 1905.

"Transfer of Land in Old English Law,"  The Harvard

Law Review, Vol. 20, No. 7, May, 1907.

"Aristotle on Legal Redress,"  Columbia Law

Review, Vol. 8, No. 7, Nov., 1908.

"The Crisis of Modern Jurisprudence,"  The Yale Law

Journal, Vol. 29, No. 3, Jan., 1920.

"The Meaning of Legal History,"  Columbia Law

Review, Vol. 22, No. 8, Dec., 1922.