Paul Vinogradoff-The Pontiff of Comparative Jurisprudence
![handle is hein.journals/illlr24 and id is 540 raw text is: PAUL VINOGRADOFF-THE PONTIFF OF
COMPARATIVE JURISPRUDENCE1
By FRANK I. SCHECHTER*
On a bright Sunday in May, 1884, two scholars, an Englishman
and a foreigner, strolled into the parks of Oxford and lying full
on the grass picked up the thread of their historial discourse. It
is an oft-told tale, that will, however, bear repetition-how the
Englishman, from the lips of the foreigner,
first received a full consciousness of that matchless collection of docu-
ments for the legal and social history of the middle ages, which England
had continuously preserved and consistently neglected, of an unbroken
stream of authentic testimony flowing for seven hundred years, of tons
of plea-rolls from which it would be possible to restore an image of long-
vanished life with a degree of fidelity which could never be won from
chronicles and professed histories. His vivid mind was instantly made
up; on the following day he returned to London, drove to the Record
Office, and being a Gloucestershire man and the inheritor of some pleas-
ant acres in that fruitful shire, asked for the earliest plea-roll of the
county of Gloucester. He was supplied with a roll for the year 1221,
and without any formal training in paleography proceeded to puzzle it
out and to transcribe it.2
A few years later Maitland wrote to Vinogradoff: I often
think what an extraordinary piece of luck for me it was that
you and I met upon a 'Sunday tramp.' That day determined the
rest of my life.s
*Member of the New York Bar.
1. The Collected Papers of Paul Vinogradoff. With a Memoir by
H. A. L. Fisher. New York, Oxford University Press, 1928, Vol. I, pp.
xiii, 326, Vol. II, pp. viii, 509. Hereafter cited merely as Collected Papers.
From time to time in the following pages reference will be made to re-
views and letters to periodicals by Vinogradoff that have not been included
in the present volumes, the editorial preparation of which, unfortunately,
appears to have been haphazard and erratic both in selection and in arrange-
ment. As Dr. Plucknett has said a third volume is certainly needed. (See
his review cited infra, note 46; also the review of Dr. Kocourek infra, note
71.) The bibliographical material on Vinogradoff is equally unsatisfactory:
the list of reviews of his works (II, 500) is fragmentary, omitting, for in-
stance, the notable reviews by Kovalevsky infra, note 16; by Ashley infra, note
25; by Dean Pound infra, note 53; by various Hellenic scholars infra, note 68;
by Baildon in (1905) 21 Law Quar. Rev. 294; by Keller in (1921) 30 Yale
Law Jour. 641; also the references to Vinogradoffs Contributions to the
Study of Anglo-Danish Civilization in De Mortinorency Danish Influence
on English Law in (1924) 40 Law Quar. Rev. at pp. 332 ff.
2. H. A. L. Fisher Frederick William Maitland (1910) pp. 24-25.
3. Ibid. p. 51.
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Paul Vinogradoff-The Pontiff of Comparative Jurisprudence
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