Edward Jenks

"The man who has been wounded by a chance arrow must not shoot at sight the first man he happens to meet."

"Legal business has, from the beginning of time, been profitable - to those who have conducted it; because it is concerned with things that touch mens passions very deeply, and because men are willing to pay, and pay highly, for wisdom and skill in the conduct of it. The real merits of the Norman lawyers were, not altruism, but ability, energy, and enthusiasm for their work."

"The invention of writs was really the making of the English Common Law; and the credit of this momentous achievement, which took place chiefly between 1150 and 1250, must be shared between the officials of the royal Chancery, who framed new forms, and the royal judges, who either allowed them or quashed them."

"The popularity of the famous device of the use of lands into England is said to be largely due to the mendicant friars of the then new Orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis, who, arriving in this country, in the first half of the thirteenth century, found themselves hampered by their own vows of poverty, no less than by the growing feeling against Mortmain in acquiring the provision of land absolutely necessary for their rapidly developing work."

"We regard an action of Contract as an action to prevent or compensate for a breach of a promise; an action of Tort as an action to to punish or compensate for a wrong, such as assault or defamation, which has not any necessary connection with a promise."

"The practice of creating chartered joint-stock companies of a modern type seems to have begun at the commencement of the seventeenth century; and the formation of the East India Company is one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, examples. At first, it appears, the joint stock of the company was separately made up for each ship; perhaps for each voyage. But, in the year 1612 the Company made the momentous resolve to have one joint stock for the whole of its affairs, and thus inaugurated a new epoch. The East India Company, or Companies, (for there were two of them), were followed by the Hudsons Bay Company (1670), the existence of which was recognized by statute in 1707, and by the Bank of England and the notorious South Sea Company."

"It may be that the requirement of a preliminary approval by the Grand Jury, of all accusations of a serious nature, justified the boast that a man was presumed to be innocent until he was found guilty; but that presumption certainly ceased to have practical application, so soon as the Grand Jury had returned a true bill."

"Perhaps the most interesting and useful short account of early institutions is to be found in Mr. Edward Jenkss The State and the Nation. The book is divided into three parts, dealing respectively with primitive institutions, patriarchal institutions, and political society. The whole treatment is admirably lucid and balanced."

"The thegn who deems an unjust doom is to lose his thegnship. It is a principle which can be widely applied"

"In the Laws of Cnut, it was formally laid down that no one is to bother the King with his complaints, so long as he can get Justice in the Hundred."

"The common law of chattels, that is to say, the law ultimately adopted by the Kings courts for the regulation of disputes about the ownership and possession of goods, was, to be a substantial extent, a by-product of that new procedure which had been mainly introduced to perfect the feudal scheme of land law."

"It is the glory of English Law, that its roots are sunk deep into the soil of national history; that it is the slow product of the age long growth of the national life."