This hugely influential work of 1861 is probably the one for which Sir Henry Maine (1822 88) is best remembered. Appointed Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge when he was only twenty-five, Maine then became Reader in Roman law and jurisprudence at the Council of Legal Education, which had been established in London in 1852 by the Inns of Court, and combined this post with research and journalism. He was interested in the relationship between the law and the society that both shaped it and consented to be regulated by it, and drew on historical examples from the culture of many...