MAKING LEGAL HISTORY
| Author | Neil Duxbury |
| Date | 01 November 1989 |
| Published date | 01 November 1989 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1989.tb02632.x |
REVIEW
ARTICLE
MAKING LEGAL HISTORY
SIR
HENRY
MAINE:
A
STUDY
IN
VICTORIAN
JURISPRUDENCE.
By
R.
C.
J.
COCKS.
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1988. vii and
221 pp. f25.00, hardback.]
I
WHEN
Sir Henry Maine died in 1888 his remaining papers were des-
troyed by his widow. A memoir
of
Maine which appeared four years
after his death was-by the standards of the time-remarkably brief
and lacking in detail.’ Just over 80 years passed before a detailed
study
of
Maine was published. That study, George Feaver’s
From
Status to Contract:
remains as the best overall account of Maine’s
life
and career. Like most other studies on Maine to have appeared since
From Status to Contract,
Raymond Cocks’ book relies heavily on
Feaver’s path-breaking research. Cocks generously acknowledges
that “without Feaver’s work it would have been much more difficult
to place Maine’s thought in the context
of
his whole life’: (pp. 8-9).3
He
is,
nevertheless, engaged
in
a wholly different enterprise from
Feaver in that he
is
concerned primarily with only one facet
of
Maine’s work: his jurisprudence.
In
so
concentrating on Maine’s jurisprudence, Cocks traces its
development from
Ancient Law
onwards, analyses various
of
its inner
discrepancies, assesses Maine’s lack
of
method, discusses his argu-
ments in relation to those
of
certain
of
his forbears and contemporar-
ies, considers how Maine’s arguments have been received and how,
at times, they have been misinterpreted and neglected. Equal iq
significance to all
of
this, for Cocks, is a precise estimation
of
Maine’s
own belief in the importance
of
jurisprudence, particularly in relation
to social change, law reform, and the values and objectives
of
the
legal profession. The result of Cocks’ effort in undertaking to con-
sider all
of
these issues is a carefully researched and sympathetic
account
of
Maine’s jurisprudence. The fundamental problem with
Cocks’ approach,
I
shall try to show, rests in the implicit assumptions
that he makes in considering both that which may have influenced
Maine, and that which Maine may-or, as Cocks would occasionally
have it, should-have influenced.
Sir M. E. Grant
Duff,
Sir Henry Maine:
A
Brief Memoir of
his
Life,
ed. Whitley
Stokes (London, 1892).
G.
A.
Feaver,
From
Slam
10 Conrrad:
A
Biography of Sir Henry Maine 1822-1888
(London, 1969). This work was originally submitted as a doctoral dissertation
to
the
London School
of
Economics in 1962.
All page references in the text are
to
R.
C.
J.
Cocks,
Sir Henry Maine.
Note also
Raymond Cocks, “Sir Henry Maine: 1822-1888” (1988)
8
Legal Sludies
247-257,
which contains various arguments additional
to
those
to
be found in the work under
review.
856
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