Sir Henry Maine

Life and ideas

Henry Maine was a British jurist and colonial official, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge and later the legal member of the Viceroy's Council in India. His book Ancient Law (1861) studied how early law developed, drawing on Roman, Hindu and other sources. He argued that early societies are built on status, the rights and duties that come from your place in a family, and that progressive societies move from status to contract, in which individuals bind themselves by agreement. He proposed that law changes through legal fictions, equity and legislation, in that order. His method of comparing legal systems across time, together with his studies of village communities in India, helped to found comparative law and the anthropology of law, and his phrase about status and contract is among the most quoted in the field.