The Great Charter is one of the most famous documents in history. Regarded as the foundation of English civil liberty, it also stands as the historic prototype of later declarations of human freedom in various lands. In the Great Charter, ...

The first champion of popular right in England was the sainted Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, himself, however, of Norman lineage, who led the first combination against the Plantagenet tyranny, and who in consequence was basely assassinated by the ...

There are not many names more noted in the history of the human intellect than that of Pythagoras of Samos, whose epoch, although uncertain both as to its beginning and as to its termination - for neither the year of ...

On the banks of the Nile was located the third of the three great seats of primeval civilization. Egypt holds with Phoenicia and Babylonia the honor of radiating all the ancient civilization over the world. The philosophers and statesmen of ...

It is most extraordinary that the ancient people, who by their language, their laws, their literature, their arts and sciences, and their great deeds, influenced their own and all subsequent ages more than any other one nation that ever existed, ...

A further development of the principles of the Roman Law through ecclesiastical influence was in the matter of the disposition of personal property upon the decease of the owner. Originally, as it will be remembered, the feudal tenure was only ...

The system of trial by jury is thought to be a product of the Common Law; and it has been sought to show that it was indigenous in England and traceable back to Alfred the Great and to Anglo-Saxon times. ...

About the end of the thirteenth century, there were more than one hundred ecclesiastical sovereign states within the limits of the German Empire. Now we can readily infer what all this means in the contest between Feudalism and the Roman ...

England and the United States have in a measure been excepted from the otherwise universal concurrence of all the civilized nations of the world in the acceptance of the Code Napoleon, or of the Civil Law of Rome in some ...

Let us proceed now to the people who in the development of law stand pre-eminent among all the nations in all the annals of time, and who have devised the most perfect legal system which the world has ever known. ...