Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/541

 REVIEWS OF BOOKS Historical Jurisprudence : An Introduction to the Systematic Study of the Development of Law. By Guy Carleton Lee, Ph.D. (New York: The Macmillan Co. 1900. Pp. xv, 517.) This is an interesting book and a good book. It is scholarly in treatment and useful in its material ; it shows the marks of broad and thorough study of the subject, and is clearly arranged and perspicuously written. It should prove a useful elementary text-book for the study of Roman law or of early English institutions. The book is so good that one feels rather provoked with Dr. Lee for not attempting less and making it better. He has collected here facts about many systems of law, from that of old Babylon to that of con- temporary Germany. He has tried to indicate the relation between these systems, and the growth of legal conceptions from the primitve notions of barbarians to modern times. That these great tasks cannot be satis- factorily accomplished in one small volume is obvious. That Dr. Lee has failed to accomplish them does not prove his work ill-done ; it proves his plan unduly ambitious. In the Introduction Dr. Lee has stated his purpose to " trace through all the tangled mazes which separate the two, the line of connection be- tween the modern and the primitive conceptions of law; " "to discover the first emergence of those legal conceptions which have become a part of the world's common store of law, to show the conditions that gave rise to them, to trace their spread and development, and to point out those conditions and influences which modified them in the varying course of their existence." "Laws are . . . easily transplanted from one nation to another by the simple intercourse of commercial life;" " this exchange of legal conceptions, and often of actual laws, is part of the subject of Historical Jurisprudence ; and by it is established the postulate of jurisprudence, that there is an abstract and universal science of right and justice to which all local and temporary systems conform, and from which they derive much of their law." "It is the duty of His- torical Jurisprudence not merely to point out the contribution which each nation and race has made to the common product, but also to show how and why the law of one nation has been adopted by another." The book is divided into Part I., Foundations of law ; Part II., The de- velopment of Jurisprudence; Part III., Beginnings of modern Jurispru- dence. This division conforms entirely to Dr. Lee's purpose as ex- pressed in the Introduction. Let us see how well the execution suits the plan. (531)