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 Sir Henry Maine was born
in England in 1822, the son of a doctor. He won a
scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he
proceeded to win most of the medals for classics and poetry.
He was appointed a tutor in 1844 at Trinity Hall, Cambridge
University’s Law College and finally become Regius Professor
of Civil Law at Cambridge in 1847. While he did qualify for
the bar, and did practice law a little, most of his life was
spent in scholarly and governmental pursuits. In 1852, he
was appointed teacher of jurisprudence at the Inns of Court
in London.
Accepting the
Indo-European hypothesis of William Jones, he worked
throughout his life to examine the evolution of the
political and legal institutions of the Indo- Europeans
after the breakeup of the home land thousands of the years
before the birth of Christ. In 1861, he published his
speculations on how law and social institutions had evolved
in a book entitled Ancient Law: Its connection with the
early history of society and its relation to modern ideas.
The book was a great success and became the most popular
book about law written in the 19the century. In it, Maine
suggested that society evolved faster than its legal
institutions and that it was the job of society’s elite to
revise law to keep up with these changes.
One of his most striking
observations was that society had moved from leasing legal
rights on “status” to basing them on freely made “contacts”,
the essential element of progress. This idea had a profound
impact on the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court between the
American civil war and the great depression.
Maine spent most of the
1860’s as a high government official in India. Attempting to
bring Indian law into the modern law era through the
development of modern legal codes. His book “Village
Communities” combined a study of Indian Villages with what
was known about ancient village practices in Europe. In
1874, he published his “Early History of Institutions” which
attempted to look at the similarities between ancient Irish
and Indian laws and institutions. In 1877, he was made
Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. His last book,
International Law, was published after his death in 1888. In
fact, the scientific study of legal history began with Sir
Henry Maine. |
