of a law or constitution cannot be grasped without careful study of all its surroundings and all its antecedents, had sunk deeply into the minds of students, and prepared the way for and gave an enormous stimulus to those methods of study which are now recognized as indispensable to any scientific treatment either of Law or of Politics.
Within the last half-century societies for the study of Comparative Law and Comparative Legislation have come into existence in France, England, Germany and elsewhere[1], and have done, and are doing, work of the greatest interest and utility. Some of them approach their subject mainly from the point of view of the lawyer or the jurist, and devote their attention primarily to those branches and aspects of the subject which fall within the domain either of private or of criminal law. Others look primarily at the constitutional and administrative experiments which are being tried by the legislatures of different countries, and thus deal with their subject as a branch of political science. Their areas of study overlap each other, and the point of view is not quite the same. Within each area they have collected and compared a vast quantity of facts which form an indispensable preliminary to, and constitute the raw material for, a scientific treatment of the studies with which they are concerned. The task that remains for the scientific jurist and for the political philosopher is to elicit, in the spirit of Montesquieu, but with fuller knowledge, and
- ↑ Société de Législation Comparée, founded 1869; Gesellschaft für vergleichende Rechts- und Stantswissenschaft, founded 1893; Internationale Vereinigung für vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft und Volkswirthschaft, founded 1894; (English) Society of Comparative Legislation, founded 1894.
