ABSTRACT

In English jurisprudence at least, the classic scheme of the sources of law is that of Salmond, who divided them first into those which are ‘formal’ and those which are ‘material’ – those imparting to a given rule the force of law and those from which its substance is drawn. He further subdivided ‘material sources’ into ‘legal’ and ‘historical’ sources – those which the law itself acknowledges, such as statute and judicial precedent in England, and those which, though possibly no less influential, are not so acknowledged, as, for instance, the Roman legal system from which, via judicial precedent, many English rules are derived. Finally, in a footnote, Salmond distinguished a category of ‘literary’ sources, consisting in ‘the sources of our knowledge of the law, or rather the original authoritative sources of our knowledge, as opposed to later commentary and literature’.1