One of my responsibilities as chief editor of Black’s Law Dictionary — which will see its much-expanded twelfth edition this summer is updating the more than 3,300 Latin maxims collected in the back of the book. Most of them capsulize legal principles of ancient vintage. Although it’s the most comprehensive set of legal — maxims to be found in print, I’ve tended to exclude those with no relevance to modern law (for example, those relating to the treatment of serfs, etc.). Many of them go back to the early Roman empire; others are as new as the English Renaissance.
What surprises, time and again, is the relevance of legal maxims to modern problems. Mind you, they’re often hardly better than epigrams (A man’s home is his castle). In law, they rarely decide cases. But they can certainly be used in support of arguments on one side or the other (Ignorance of the law is no excuse). On the whole, though, as Justice Holmes once wrote, “general propositions do not decide concrete cases.”
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