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Written for the layman as well as the attorney, The Story of Law is the only complete outline history of the law ever published. "It is," too, noted journalist William Allen White of the original edition, "the sort of book that any lawyer could take home and give to his children in their teens and twenties as a justification of his career." Moreover, The Story of Law has well been termed "the perfect book for introducing the beginning law student to the origin and history of the law." John M. Zane lucidly describes the growth and improvement of the law over thousands of years, and he points out that an increasing awareness of the individual as a person who is responsible for decision and action gradually transformed the law. The seventeen chapters include "The Physical Basis of Law," "Law Among Primordial Men," "Babylonian Law," "The Jewish Law," "Law Among the Greeks," "The Roman Creation of Modern Law," "Medieval Law in Europe," "The Origins of English Law," and "International Law." Professor Charles J. Reid, Jr., of Emory University School of Law, has contributed an unsurpassed forty-page "Selected Bibliography on Legal History" that will be of enormous interest to academics, students, practicing attorneys, and general readers alike.

"The story of the law must teach us that changes are to be made by the innovations of time slowly and by degrees. If suddenly we begin hacking to pieces our aged mother, only evil can result. It must not be true that for some fancied benefit we shall unsettle the landmarks that mark the progress of the ages. Personal desires, the theories of particular men can have little or no effect upon the law, for she must represent the wishes and desires of us all. She must have still the standard that was her standard ages ago, the ordinary reasonable man, not easily moved to action, clinging to his ancestral robe of habits and accustomed ways, yet in the main striving to make this world a better place for his children. The law is like this her favorite son, the average reasonable man. She too must cling to the institutions which she knows and has proven, for she bears upon her shoulders the burdens of humanity. We must not blame her for our many human errors; she gives us the rule, she asks us to apply it reasonably and fairly and when we fail, out of our own want of insight, we turn upon her and bitterly arraign her, but she answers not a word.
Yes, we arraign her but she,
The weary Titan with deaf
Ears and labor-dimmed eyes,
Regarding neither to right
Nor left, goes passively by,
Bearing on shoulders immense,
Atlantean, the load
Well-nigh not to be borne
Of the too vast orb of her fate."

John Maxcy Zane

John Maxcy Zane (1863 – 1937) was a leading lawyer in Utah and Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He wrote on the law of banking, Roman law, Lincoln’s constitutional theory, and a history of the growth and development of the law from ancient times to the present.