Sir Henry James Sumner Maine, KCSI, FRS (15 August 1822 – 3 February 1888), was a British Whig[1] comparative jurist[2] and historian.

Plans of codification were prepared, and largely shaped, under Maine's direction, which were implemented by his successors, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen and Dr Whitley Stokes.

[9] In 1869, Maine was appointed to the chair of historical and comparative jurisprudence newly founded in the University of Oxford by Corpus Christi College.

[10] Residence at Oxford was not required, and the election amounted to an invitation to the new professor to resume and continue in his own way the work he had begun in Ancient Law.

There were two strong candidates whose claims were so nearly equal that it was difficult to elect either; the difficulty was solved by a unanimous invitation to Maine to accept the post.

Ten years later, he was elected to succeed Sir William Harcourt as Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge.

Lectures delivered by Maine for the Inns of Court were the groundwork of Ancient Law (1861), the book by which his reputation was made at one stroke.

In all these works, the phenomena of societies in an archaic stage are brought into line to illustrate the process of development in legal and political ideas[11] (see freedom of contract).

An essay on India was his contribution to the composite work entitled The Reign of Queen Victoria[11] (editor Thomas Humphry Ward, 1887).

[11] In 1886, there appeared in the Quarterly Review an article on the posthumous work of J. F. McLennan, edited and completed by his brother, entitled "The Patriarchal Theory".