An Introduction to Municipal Law; Designed for General Readers and for Students in Colleges and Higher Schools (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE SECOND EDITION. In publishing a new and somewhat revised edition of this book, I desire to express my sincere thanks for the approval which it has met from jurists and scholars most competent to pass judgment upon such a work. As its whole scope and design were new, as it was intended for the use of general readers, of students in colleges and higher schools, and as introductory to the course of professional studies by law students, it differs both in plan and mode of treatment from the ordinary legal text-books. Its original method has not been departed from in preparing a new edition. Some alterations have been made in order to give the result of recent decisions upon an important subject, and an index has been added, which was wanting in the first edition; but the text is substantially unchanged. The last part, which contains an outline of our civil jurisprudence, is intentionally brief and element' ary, for the use of general readers and college classes, and not designed to take the place, in a course of professional study, of such institutional writers as Kent and Blackstone. The historical and by far most important portion contains the results of modern scholarship, English, German, and French, taken from works of the highest authority, which are not ordinarily found in the lawyer's library, and many of which are not always accessible by the general reader. Historical errors, into which Lord Coke, Black- stone, and other legal text-writers have fallen, while describing the primitive condition of our institutions and jurisprudence, are tacitly corrected under the light of more recent research. I make no claim, of course, to any originality of historical investigation; but I think that the reader and student will here find many facts concerning the origin, p...