For TX Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1876, In the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. Rec. Oct. 13, 1905. INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION OF SANDARS' INSTITUTES OF JUSTINIAN. BY WILLIAM G. HAMMOND, LL.D., CHANCELLOR OF THE LAW DEPARTMENT OF IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY. INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. MR. SANDARS has provided, in his Introduction, Notes and Summary to this edition of the Institutes, such an ample apparatus for the student's use, that when I was first asked by the American publishers to prepare an introduction to the American reprint, it seemed to me impossible to add anything that should not appear merely superfluous. On second thought, however, it occurred to me that some general account of the classification of Roman law, and of the relation between that classification and the arrangement of our own. law, especially as represented in Blackstone, might serve to increase the interest taken by American students in the comparative study of both systems. Some years' experience in teaching both has convinced me that such an interest is the first requisite to a more general and careful study of the civil law among us. It cannot be expected that beginners shall grapple with the abstruse questions of comparative jurisprudence, or that they will find any pleasure in turning from the novel terms and technical phraseology of one law, as yet imperfectly mastered, to the still more novel and technical phrases and doctrines of another system, if the two are carefully kept apart, and their surface differences more insisted on than their real but less evident unity. To appreciate the Institutes, or the other works of the Roman jurists, they must learn to look upon them as the precursors of Blackstone, Kent and Story; as stages in the development of one great science, which, in spite of temporary |