is often hard to find, and often faked. From this need comes the immense use of legal transplants, and the astonishing longevity of unsuitable law. Of the four sources of law, legislation, custom, judicial decision and juristic opinion, only legislation can be free from this need for authority; but it is not. More-over, at most times in most places governments are little interested in making private law or even in the rules of criminal law. They leave much of law making to lesser beings who, indeed, are not directly given authority to make law. Each lecture deals with specific rules or specific events. I am not at ease with general theories of law and society. But I must insist that the particular topics with which I deal, though each is important in its own right, have a wider significance. They are not uniquely peculiar. If I had been giving a series of lectures to the same audience this Introduction would have been the concluding talk. It contains some material not discussed in the Lectures. In Lecture , I discuss one feature of legal transplants: legal transformation. When law moves from one society to another it may undergo change or appear very different in its new environment. I chose as my topic the Roman treatment of natural law and ius gentium (which has more than one meaning). In classical Rome natural law was a focus of attention for the philosophically minded, and there was more than one approach. But the Roman jurists were not interested in legal theory, only in positive law. So they gave natural law a meaning that meant it could be discarded and left undiscussed. Natural law was defined as law that applied to all animals including humans, hence it was nothing more than instinct, not law at all. (Though natural law does occasionally appear in other Roman legal contexts, it is not seriously discussed as a theory or general guide for conduct.) Moreover, Justinian’s Byzantine compilers stuck closely to the substance of their Roman sources. Thus, in the Institutes and also
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