Ancient Law

In Homer’s age, a king does not make the law: a god whispers a judgment into his mind. How did those separate, divinely inspired verdicts become the rules societies live by?

Sir Henry Sumner Maine begins his study of early law among the Greeks and Romans, where written codes came after older ways of deciding disputes. In Homer, Themis gives a judge his Themistes—not laws, but individual judgments. As similar cases recur, Maine traces the first stirrings of custom, challenging theories that treat law as a command made by a lawgiver or a timeless rule of nature. From the family’s sacred rites to the foundations of jurisprudence, he asks us to look where legal history begins: before anyone thought of law as a code. What, then, held a society together when no lawmaker had yet spoken?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.