Territorial Expansion of the Common Law Ideal

Authors

John F. Simmons

Abstract

It is a truism to declare that we live in an age of evolution; but evolution is only growth and growth, however trite it may seem, is after all an ever-recurring miracle and a miracle implies the marvelous. Among the marvels which appear in the evolution of our times, none is more remarkable than the persistency of the expansion of the ideas and ideals of the Common Law. Before the dawn of history, the records which the tongues of mankind have kept, and which the persistency of certain tribal peculiarities has confirmed, teach us that the races which today dominate the lands inhabited by so-called civilized men, dwelt together somewhere in Asia, east of the Ural Mountains and west of the western boundaries of the present Chinese Empire. Here they spoke the same language. They seem to have been a pastoral people of a grade of intelligence and, if you please, of civilization, which far exceeded that of their neighbors, while it fell below that of the crudest of their descendants of to-day.

Recommended Citation

John F. Simmons, Territorial Expansion of the Common Law Ideal, 4 Mich. L. Rev. 1 (1905).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol4/iss1/1