Dissertations on Early Law and Custom: Chiefly Selected from Lectures Delivered at Oxford

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J. Murray, 1883 - Comparative law - 402 pages

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Page 101 - If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband's brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband's brother unto her.
Page 101 - Now there were with us seven brethren : and the first, when he had married a wife, deceased, and, having no issue, left his wife unto his brother: 26 Likewise the second also, and the third, unto the seventh.
Page 219 - Romans may be taken as the type of them, and they are so described to us that we can scarcely help conceiving them as a system of concentric circles which have gradually expanded from the same point. The elementary group is the Family, connected by common subjection to the highest male ascendant. The aggregation of Families forms the Gens or House.
Page 2 - I can no longer bear to be at the mercy of our pundits, who deal out Hindu law as they please, and make it at reasonable rates, when they cannot find it ready made.
Page 389 - is the ascendancy of the law of actions in the infancy of courts of justice, that substantive law has at first the look of being gradually secreted in the interstices of procedure.
Page 101 - Master, Moses said, if a man die, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife, and raise up seed unto his brother. Now there were with us seven brethren : and the first, when he had married a wife, deceased, and having no issue, left his wife unto his brother : Likewise the second also, and the third, unto the seventh. And last of all the woman died also. Therefore in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven ? for they all had her.
Page 123 - Three persons, a wife, a son, and a slave, are declared by law to have (in general) no wealth exclusively their own ; the wealth which they may earn is (regularly) acquired for the man to whom they belong.
Page 196 - Patriarchal theory is etated as 'the theory of the origin of society in separate families, held together by the authority and protection of the eldest valid ascendant.
Page 228 - unattainable by unsettled and childishly heedless races," among whom, nevertheless, a horror of incest is developed most strongly.2 Sir Henry Maine, on the other hand, thinks that the men who discovered the use of fire and selected the wild forms of certain animals for domestication and of vegetables for cultivation, might also have been able to find out that children of unsound constitution were born of nearly related parents.3 In the next chapter, I shall have occasion to mention some instances...
Page 163 - dooms ' — are doubtless drawn from preexisting custom or usage, but the notion is that they are conceived by the king spontaneously or through divine prompting. It is plainly a later development of the same view when the prompting comes from a learned lawyer, or from an authoritative law-book" (" Early Law and Custom,

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