The Nature and Sources of Law 2nd ed

Out of Print

1972 Reprint of the original Macmillan Company edition of 1921

Preface to the Beacon Press Edition
A story of my own experience of Gray as a law teacher may perhaps serve to introduce his book to the student of the science of law.

One morning in the Christmas recess of 1889, during my first year as a student in Harvard Law School, I was in the reading room at work on the first volume of Gray's Cases on Property. At the beginning of each section Gray had placed an extract from the Institutes of Justinian, in the original Latin. Those were the days when college education was classical and college graduates were expected to read Latin as a matter of course.

I was trying to find out what the text of Roman law before me meant and what it had to do with what we were studying; and I thought that I ought to know something about Roman law. So I went to the delivery desk and asked the man in charge for a book on Roman law. He went into the stacks and brought back Lord Mackenzie's Roman Law, probably the least useful book for any purpose of an American student that could be conceived.

While I was trying unsuccessfully to make something out of it, I heard a gruff voice behind me saying, "Don't read that." I looked up, saw that it was Professor Gray, and asked him, "What should I read?" He asked, "Do you read German?" and on my reply that I could, he took Lord Mackenzie's book away from me, went into the stacks, and came back with Sohm's Institutionen des riimischen Rechts-in those days the great book on Roman law, which had not then been translated into English-"Read that," he announced and walked off. This was characteristic of Gray as a teacher. He put the student in touch with the right material and expected him to put it to good use...
Roscoe Pound
University Professor Emeritus
formerly Dean of Harvard Law School
1962

John Chipman Gray, 1839-1915, was an American lawyer and law professor. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1861, served in the Civil War and then entered into the practice of law in Boston. In 1869, he began teaching at Harvard Law School and he continued both practice and teaching until the last years of his life. He was a leading advocate of the case system of teaching law and was a recognized authority both in the United States and England on the law of real property.