Edward Jenks Quotes

#1. Is it surprising that modern English land law should resemble a chaos rather than a system?

Edward Jenks

#2. What is technically called the 'fungibility' of money, is its chief value as an article of commerce; and this fact could not long remain recognized, even by such a conservative class as legal officials.

Edward Jenks

#3. But we remember that it was just precisely in the reign of Richard II that the Peasants' War, following upon the changes wrought by the visitations of the Great Plague, virtually destroyed serfdom as a personal status.

Edward Jenks

#4. 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.

Edward Jenks

#5. But the fact that the word "chattel" has survived as the inclusive legal term for all movable goods, points, not merely to the great importance of cattle in primitive times, but to the importance of the notion of sale or barter in generating the institution of property.

Edward Jenks

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

Edward Jenks

#7. It was not long before English Law took the one step needed to produce the modern scheme of legal remedies. And when it did, it used the Writ of Trespass as the starting point.

Edward Jenks

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

Edward Jenks

#9. It is true, that a Law of Contract based on causae will always be an arbitrary and inelastic law; but it is a kind of law with which some great nations are satisfied at the present day.

Edward Jenks

#10. 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.

Edward Jenks

#11. The 'inquests' which resulted in the compilation of the Domesday Book made a vivid and unfavorable impression on the country. A similar effect was produced by the inquests of 1166 and 1170, before alluded to. Even to this day, the word 'inquisitorial' bears the burden of historical unpopularity.

Edward Jenks

#12. Whatever else the Norman Conquest may or may not have done, it made the old haphazard state of legal affairs forever impossible.

Edward Jenks

#13. Only when a disputed point has long caused bloodshed and disturbance, or when a successful invader (military or theological) insists on a change, is it necessary to draw up a code.

Edward Jenks

#14. The process of specialization tends, almost inevitably, to narrow the sources from which the rules of any science are drawn; and English law is no exception from this rule.

Edward Jenks