OF THE LAW OF ENGLAND.
FOLLOWING the method of Justinian's body of the RoFollowing the method of Justinian's body of the Ro- man law, modern writers of digests or institutes of the codes of their respective countries have commonly arranged their subject tinder the three );;eat titles of Rights of Persons, Rights of Things, and Actions, or the several sorts of legal pruLoss. This di isiun is either not logical in itself, or is expressed with great inaccuracy. ?// law relates to rights of persons only. Things have no rights ; and to them, therefore, as possessing rights, law can have no relation. Actions, also, or the different kinds of legal process, are nothing else than a particular class of rights, of which the several members of the community may avail themselves as much as of their rights of any other description. But if, on the other hand, Justinian, and the writers who have fol lowed him, mean only by rights of persons, rights of things, and actions, three great classes of rights comprehending the whole subject of law, there seems no good objection to the arrangement, although the expressions they have used are sufficiently inaccurate, and liable to misapprehen sion.
Certain rights arise from the status, condition, or rank of men in society, as the ecclesiastical and military states,— from their more usual and intimate relation to one another, as governors and governed, husband and wife, Sec.—and from kindred or affinity, as parent and child. From this status, relation and affinity, proceed what may be called, in a more limited and peculiar sense, the rights of persons.
Another class of rights is more immediately connected with property ; and this being divisible into two great spe cies, real and personal property, hence a correspondent dis tribution of this class of rights into the two subordinate di visions of real and personal. This class of tights may be denominated rights arising from property.
A third class of rights may be arranged under the title of actions, being the several modes of judicial process to which every member of the state has right, as the means by which he may claim or defend all or any of his other rights.
We shall accordingly, in the following abstract, observe this threefold distribution of rights. But as it may some times serve to place the rights both of persons, strictly so denominated, and those arising from things, in a stronger point of view, we shall occasionally regard them in a nega tive or violated state, or, as it is more usually expressed, under the aspect of private wrongs. The several modes by which these rights are acquired and transmitted will al so fall to be considered. And under Actions, besides what is more proper to the subject, we shall introduce some no tice of the different sorts of courts, their jurisdiction, A fourth division of our subject will relate to Cringes; which may be regarded as the rights conferred by nature, or derived from law, in a state of such gross violation as oc casions alarm, by occasioning insecurity, to every member of the community. And hence this branch of the subject has by writers on the law of England usually been deno minated public wrongs.—We shall premise a brief Intro duction on the sources and component parts of the laws of England.
Introduction.
1. The municipal law of England, or the rule of civil conduct prescribed to the inhabitants of that kingdom, may with sufficient propriety be divided into two kinds ; the lex non scripta, the unwritten or common law; and the lex scripta, the written or statute law.
2. The lex non scripta, or unwritten law, includes not only general customs, or the common law properly so cas ed, but alsu the particular customs of certain parts of the kingdom ; and likewise those particular laws that are by custom observed only in certain courts and jurisdictions.
When we call these parts or the law legcs non scripta, we would not be understood as if all those laws were at present merely oral, or communicated from former ages to the present solely by word of mouth, but because their original institution and authority are not set down in writ ing as acts of parliament are, but receive their binding power, and the force of laws, by long and immemorial usage, and by their universal reception throughout the kingdom.