Page:Englishhistorica36londuoft.djvu/245

 1921 237 Reviews of Books Outlines of Historical Jurisprudence. By Sir Paul Vinogradoff, F.B.A. y Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence in the University of Oxford. Vol. i. Introduction: Tribal Law. (Oxford: University Press, 1920.) Sir Paul Vinogradoff gives us in this volume the first instalment of what promises to be a comprehensive and valuable treatment of the whole field of jurisprudence. He calls it ' Historical ', but he evidently intends his historical treatment to be both general and comparative. The book opens with an elaborate introduction, the first part of which treats of law in its relation to logic, to psychology, and social science (under which term he includes economics), and political theory. The second part deals with methods and schools of jurisprudence, these schools being classified as (a) rationalists, including, among those who proceed on the basis of theoretic principles, writers so different one from another as are Hobbes and Kant, Rousseau and Bentham ; (b) nationalists ; and (c) evolutionists. From this preliminary survey our author proceeds to the main substance of the book in a series of chapters on tribal laws which fill the rest of the volume, and are devoted to the following subjects : The Elements of the Family, Aryan Culture, The Clan and the. Tribe. The themes dealt with in the Introduction, comparatively familiar to most of us, are handled in a temperate and catholic spirit. Sir Paul Vinogradoff is justly surprised at the importance which Englishmen of the last generation attached to the lucubrations of John Austin, and he remarks upon their barrenness. He gives a few pages to the controversies, largely due to the misunderstanding by opposing parties, of terms which, though common to both, are often employed in different senses ; but as I have stated my own views on this subject, and especially on the controversies relating to the doctrine of sovereignty, in a book (Studies in Jurisprudence) published some years ago, I will not add to the number of the combatants. Sir Paul's remarks on the views and services of Sir H. Maine and of F. W. Maitland are justly appreciative. One is a little surprised at the importance he assigns to Darwinism as having induced the application of a new method to the study of constitutions and laws. That the idea of the growth and development of institutions by a continual process of change and development became more widely diffused throughout the general public after Darwin had pointed out the methods and pro- cesses by which the species of animals and plants might have been, and probably were, differentiated, is no doubt true. The analogy — it was only an analogy — between these processes and the growth of human institutions was interesting and stimulating. But the idea of development as applied