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Home > Journals > Michigan Law Review > MLR > Volume 23 > Issue 4 (1925)

 

Abstract

That a specific rule in Greek law should be of value to the decision of a legal question arising among us would seem at first blush improbable. Both the historical and analytical jurists have insisted so strongly upon the causes which tend to make any system of positive law something peculiar in itself that they have obscured the fact that the rules of substantive law are quite likely to be the same for like circumstances among nations which have reached a comparatively high level of civilization. The now dominant school of juristic thought, which teaches what its foremost exponent has called synthetic jurisprudence, is supplying by comparative law-at once comparative and historical-and by the additional factors supplied by psychology and the social sciences, what is needed to correct the narrowness of the analytical and historical juristic thinking. That foremost exponent, Sir Paul Vinogradoff, has put forth in his second volume of Historical Jurisprudence a long needed treatise on Greek law. For the first time, law as it was received among the most brilliant race of antiquity is made to present an appearance recognizable by jurists and by those of juristic thought. Long the chosen ground of contentions among commentators and classical scholars, without much practical legal equipment, the writing upon Greek law has borne the appearance of either wild theories or of a not very intelligible inquiry into the adjective law-forms of actions, methods of procedure and descriptions of tribunals-a part of the law which is bound to be more or less peculiar and sui generis in any nation. It needed the effort of a great jurist like Vinogradoff, fully equipped with a first hand acquaintance with Greek literature and especially with the philosophers, to give reality and vividness to the rules of substantive law among the ancient Greeks. We venture to say that this volume is indispensable to correct conceptions upon Greek jurisprudence, and to those desirous of acquiring some knowledge of those principles, whose use and adoption among the Romans created a world wide jurisprudence, the volume is no less indispensable.

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