Development of Legal Institutions_, the editors
venture the statement, in justification of the materials from sociology
that these volumes include, that "contrary, perhaps, to legal tradition,
the law itself is only a social phenomenon and not to be understood in
detachment from human uses, necessities and forces from which it
arises." Justice Holmes's characterization of law as "a great
anthropological document" seems to support that position.

Law in its origin is related to religion. The first public law was that
which enforced the religious taboos, and the ceremonial purifications
and expiations were intended to protect the community from the divine
punishment for any involuntary disrespect or neglect of the rites due
the gods which were the first crimes to be punished by the community as
a whole, and for the reason that failure to punish or expiate them would
bring disaster upon the community as a whole.

Maine says that the earliest conceptions of law or a rule of life among
the Greeks are contained in the Homeric words _Themis_ and _Themistes_.

When a king decided a dispute by a sentence, the judgment was
assumed to be the result of direct inspiration. The divine
agent, suggesting judicial awards to kings or to gods, the
greatest of kings, was _Themis_. The peculiarity of the
conception is brought out by the use of the plural.
_Themistes_, Themises, the plural of Themis, are the awards
themselves, divinely dictated to the judge. Kings are spoken of
as if they had a store of "Themistes" ready to hand for use;
but it must be distinctly understood that they are not laws,
but judgments. "Zeus, or the human king on earth," says Mr.
Grote, in his _History of Greece_, "is not a law-maker, but a
judge." He is provided with Themistes, but, consistently with
the belief in their emanation from above, they cannot be
supposed to be connected by any thread of principle; they are
separate, isolated judgments.[278]

It is only in recent times, with the gradual separation of the function
of the church and the state, that legal institutions have acquired a
character wholly secular. Within the areas of social life that are
represented on the one hand by religion and on the other by law are
included all the sanctions and the processes by which society maintains
its authority and imposes its will upon its individual members.[279]

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