MAINE, SIR HENRY JAMES SUMNER (1822-1888), English comparative jurist and historian, son of Dr. James Maine, of Kelso, Roxburghshire, was born on Aug. 15, 1822. He was educated at Christ's Hospital and Pembroke college, Cambridge. In 1847 he was appointed regius professor of civil law, and he was called to the bar three years later; he held this chair till Even the rudiments of Roman law were not then included in the ordinary training of English lawyers. Maine's lectures as reader to the Inns of Court were the groundwork of Ancient Law 0860, the book which made his reputation at one stroke. Its object was "to indicate some of the earliest ideas of mankind, as they are reflected in ancient law, and to point out the relation of those ideas to modern thought." From 1863 to 1869 Maine was legal member of council in India. Plans of codification of Indian law were prepared, and largely shaped, under the direction of Maine, and they were car ried into effect by his successors, Sir J. Fitzjames Stephen and Dr. Whitley Stokes. The results are open to criticism in details, but form on the whole a remarkable achievement in the con version of unwritten and highly technical law into a body of written law sufficiently clear to be administered by officers to many of whom its ideas and language are foreign. All this was in addition to the routine of legislative and consulting work and the establishment of the legislative department of the Govern ment of India on substantially its present footing.
Maine brought back from his Indian office a store of knowledge which enriched all his later writings, though he took India by name for his theme only once. Three of his addresses as vice chancellor of Calcutta university were published, wholly or in part, in the later editions of Village Communities; the substance of others is understood to be embodied in the Cambridge Rede lecture of 1875, which is to be found in the same volume. The practical side of Maine's experience was not long lost to India; he became a member of the secretary of State's council in 1871, and remained so for the rest of his life. In 1869, Maine was appointed to the new chair of historical and comparative juris prudence at Oxford. During the succeeding years he published the principal matters of his lectures in a carefully revised literary form : Village Communities in the East and the West (1871); Early History of Institutions (1875) ; Early Law and Custom (1883). In all these works the phenomena of societies in an archaic stage, whether still capable of observation or surviving in a fragmentary manner among more modern surroundings or pre served in contemporary records, are brought into line, often with singular felicity, to establish and illustrate the normal process of development in legal and political ideas.
In 1877 Maine became master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and in 1887 Whewell professor of international law. This branch of his work is represented by a posthumous volume which had not received his own final revision, International Law (i888). Mean while he had published in 1885 his one work of speculative politics, a volume of essays on Popular Government, designed to show that democracy is not in itself more stable than any other form of government, and that there is no necessary connection between democracy and progress. The book was deliberately un popular in tone; it excited much controversial comment and some serious and useful discussion.
Maine's health, which had never been strong, gave way towards the end of 1887. He went to the Riviera under medical advice, and died at Cannes on Feb. 3, 1888. His work was promptly and fully appreciated on the Continent, where it has perhaps been understood better than in England that it is as the pioneer of a method that he must be estimated. But his basic conception of the development of law is disputable. A Hegelian in philosophy, he regards law as developing "from status to contract," from a state in which legal relations are independent of the will to one in which they flow from it. But was this conception a part of Roman law at all, or imported into it by the school of Savigny? Is the movement anything more than from the group to the individual, and was the growing importance of contract not due rather to Stoic conceptions of duty than to igth century con ceptions of the value of the will? The tendency he postulated was certainly that of his time; the tendency to-day seems to be the other way.
See Sir A. Lyall and others, in Law Quart. Rev. iv. 129 seq. (i888) ; Sir F. Pollock, "Sir Henry Maine and his Work," in Oxford Lectures, etc. (189o) ; "Sir H. Maine as a Jurist," Edin. Rev. (July 1893) ; Intro duction and Notes to new ed. of Ancient Law (1906) ; Sir M. E. Grant Duff, Sir Henry Maine: a brief Memoir of his Life, etc. (1892) ; L. Stephen, "Maine" in Dict. Nat. Biog. (1893) ; P. Vinogradoff, The Teaching of Sir Henry Maine (1904) •