Towards Legal Understanding: II

Abstract

"Men make their own history," including their legal history. But they make it "not under conditions chosen by themselves, but under conditions found at hand, given and handed down."2 Though they never leave conditions as they find them, they adapt old ways and beliefs to new desires and interests, to persist, in spite of changes, in conditions handed down. An outline, necessarily attenuated, of salient changes in legal conditions in successive periods of Anglo-American history has been carried to the middle of the nineteenth century. It will be briefly interrupted for a closer view of an ancient illusion whose moral products, handed down through centuries, are factors in the confused legal conditions of to-day.