Note 73 — ENGLISH LAW AND THE RENAISSANCE.

It may be interesting to notice that in 1856, and perhaps even in 1871, Sir H. Maine believed that the Code of Louisiana (‘of all republications of Roman law the one which appears to us the clearest, the fullest, the most philosophical and the best adapted to the exigencies of modern society’) had a grand destiny before it in the United States. ‘Now it is this code, and not the Common Law of England which the newest American States are taking for the substratum of their laws.… The Roman law is, therefore, fast becoming the lingua franca of universal jurisprudence.’ (Maine, Roman Law and Legal Education, 1856, reprinted in Village Communities, ed. 3, pp. 360-1.) Nowadays this hope or fear of a Reception of Roman law in the United States seems, so I am given to understand, quite unfounded. See e.g. J. F. Dillon, Laws and Jurisprudence of England and America, 1894, p. 155: ‘the common law [in distinction from the Roman or civil law] is the basis of the laws of every State and Territory of the Union, with comparatively unimportant and gradually waning exceptions.’