Book Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Xect. I. THE STUDY OP JURISPRUDENCE. LECTURE I. THE EAST. AND THE STUDY OF JUBISPRDDENCE. In the Academical Statute which defines the duties of the Professor of Jurisprudence, the branches of enquiry to which he is directed to address himself are described as the investigation of the history and principles of law, and the comparison of the laws of various communities. The Lectures to which I am about to ask your attention will deal Jin some detail with the relation of the customary law of the East, and more particularly of India, to the laws and usages, past and present, of other societies; but, as we are employed upon a subject?and this is a warning which cannot be too soon given?in which ambiguities of expression are extraordinarily common and extremely dangerous, I perhaps should state at once that the comparison which we shall be making will not constitute Comparative Jurisprudence in the sense in which those words are understood by most modern jurists, or in that which, I think, was intended by the authors of the statute. Comparative Jurisprudence in this last sense has not for its object to throw light upon 4 COMPARATIVE JURISPRUDENCE. Lect. i. the history of law. Nor is it universally allowed that it throws light upon its philosophy or principles. What it does, is to take the legal systems of two distinct societies under some one head of law?as for example some one kind of Contract, or the department of Husband and Wife?and to compare these chapters of the systems under consideration. It takes the heads of law which it is examining at any point of their historical development, and does not affect to discuss their history, to which it is indifferent. What is the relation of Comparative Jurisprudence, thus understood, to the philosophy of law or the determinati...