The Story of Law

This is one of the series of high quality, low cost reprints of legal and historical classics published by The Liberty Press. It was originally published in 1927, and first reprinted by Liberty in 1992. Zane was a successful commercial attorney who also had a strong interest in the history of the law. This book was an ambitious undertaking, an outline of the development of the Western legal tradition from prehistoric to modern times. It is no doubt regarded as being hopelessly out of date by modern legal scholars, but I haven't seen anything better or more recent for the general reader. Zane's style is for the most part simple and straightforward, understandable by the reader of average education and literacy. At the time he wrote this book, in the mid-1920's, prosperity had come for the first time to millions of Americans, and television had not yet been invented. Reading was a major middle-class activity, the Book of the Month Club and Readers Digest were becoming household names, and Zane's book was aimed at that newly educated audience. Zane has a couple of hobby-horses, one being that commercial law is the foundation of civilization, and he tends to ride it a bit excessively. He may be correct in his opinion, given that commerce is the foundation of the prosperity and dominance of our modern "Western" civilization, but his own professional bias is also clearly at work. He was also fascinated by the development of the English court system and legal profession. His description of those institutions in the Late Middle Ages is a bit tedious, with more detail than the average general reader is likely to find interesting. He is very opinionated, which I find entertaining, but this may not be to everyone's taste. He believed that law evolved organically out of the fact that human beings were creatures who lived in groups and therefore needed to regulate their behavior towards each other in order to survive and reproduce. Law, for Zane, is a human creation, deeply based on custom and biology, not on divine will or the theories of judges. His very informative discussion of the origins of the concept of "natural law" illustrates this belief. He has little good to say about the laws of the ancient Greeks, attributes most of what we now call law, including the English Common Law, to the Romans. He also has little regard for the Anglo-Saxons, or Justice Coke, or the jury system. His chapter on the development of the American legal system is titled "The Absolute Reign of Law", which states his view of the case very clearly. He spends much time in this chapter discussing the impeachment of Justice Samuel Chase in 1804, which he believes permanently set the shape of the American political system. (It should be noted that Justice Rehnquist wrote a history of the Chase impeachment in 1992.) His chapter on international law includes a long discussion of the Alabama Claims tribunal. He had a jaundiced view of the American attitude t

Reading this book is an cheerful thing.it is fit for all kinds of people.