Law & Justice's Principles and Maxims of Jurisprudence by John George Phillimore – Indian Reprint, 2026

Law & Justice Publishing Co. brings out the 2026 Indian reprint of Principles and Maxims of Jurisprudence by John George Phillimore — a classic of nineteenth-century English legal thought, in a 432-page paperback at a price Indian students and practitioners can actually pay.

About the work

First published in 1856, Phillimore's treatise belongs to the generation of English jurists who set out to give law a systematic grounding rather than leave it as an accumulation of decided cases. Its subject is the maxims — the compressed propositions in which the common law states its own first principles — and what they rest on.

Phillimore's method is comparative and historical. He traces the maxims back through Roman law and the civilians, sets the English rule beside its continental counterpart, and asks in each case whether the proposition states a principle of reason or merely a rule of local practice. That is why the book has outlasted its century: the maxims it examines are still recited in Indian courts and still examined in Indian jurisprudence papers, and this is one of the few works that explains where they came from and what they actually mean.

What the book deals with

• The nature and sources of jurisprudence, and the place of principle in a system built on precedent.
• The legal maxims — their origin, authority and proper limits, and the danger of applying them mechanically.
• Roman law and the civilians, and what English law took from them.
• Comparative treatment of English and continental doctrine on the fundamental questions.
• The relation of law to morality, reason and equity.

Who should buy this book

• LL.B. and LL.M. students taking Jurisprudence and Legal Theory — a primary source rather than a summary of one.
• Judicial service aspirants, for whom legal maxims are a standing examination topic.
• Advocates who cite maxims and want to know their provenance and their limits.
• Academics and research scholars in jurisprudence, legal history and comparative law.
• Law libraries building a jurisprudence classics collection.

About the author

John George Phillimore (1808–1865) was an English barrister, Queen's Counsel and Member of Parliament, and Reader in Constitutional Law and Legal History to the Inns of Court. He wrote on Roman law, international law and the history of English jurisprudence, and belonged to the circle of Victorian jurists who pressed for the systematic reform of English law.

Law & Justice Publishing Co. reprints a wide series of jurisprudence classics in affordable Indian editions, including Austin, Bentham, Holland, Salmond, Pound, Kant, Cardozo and Vinogradoff.