the historical jurist of the
nineteenth century, this fact, coupled with the development of
ownership out of possession, served to show us the idea which was
realizing in human experience of the administration of justice and to
confirm the position reached by the metaphysical jurists. Individual
private property was a corollary of liberty and hence law was not
thinkable without it. Even if we do not adopt the metaphysical part of
this argument and if we give over the idealistic-political
interpretation of legal history which it involves, there is much which
is attractive in the theory of the historical jurists of the last
century. Yet as we look at certain movements in the law there are
things to give us pause. For one thing, the rise and growth of ideas
of "negotiability," the development of the maxim _possession vaut
titre_ in Continental law, and the cutting down in other ways of the
sphere of recognition of the interest of the owner in view of the
exigencies of the social interest in the security of transactions,
suggests that the tendency involved in the first of the two
propositions relied on by the historical school has passed its
meridian. The Roman doctrine that no one may transfer a greater title
than he has is continually giving way before the demand for securing
of business transactions had in good faith. And in Roman law in its
maturity the rules that restricted acquisition by adverse possession
and enabled the owner in many cases to reclaim after any lapse of
time were superseded by a decisive limitation of actions which cut
off all claims. The modern law in countries which take their law
from Rome has developed this decisive limitation. Likewise in our
law the hostility to the statute of limitations, so marked in
eighteenth-century decisions, has given way to a policy of upholding
it. Moreover the rapid rise in recent times of limitations upon the
_ius disponendi_, the imposition of restrictions in order to secure
the social interest in the conservation of natural resources, and
English projects for cutting off the _ius abutendi_ of the landowner,
could be interpreted by the nineteenth-century historical jurists only
as marking a retrograde development. When we add that with the
increase in number and influence of groups in the highly organized
society of today a tendency is manifest to recognize practically and
in back-handed ways group property in what are not legal entities, it
becomes evident that the