Those who took the road to democracy to be the road to freedom mistook temporary means for an ultimate end. - Frederic William Maitland

It is hard to think away out of our heads a history which has long lain in a remote past but which once lay in the future.

All Europe over, lawyers were being at once attracted and puzzled by the Roman doctrine of possession... Roman law compels us to hold that there are some occupiers who are not possessors. In an evil hour the English judges, who were controlling a new possessory action, which had been suggested by foreign models, adopted this theory at the expense of the termor... English law for six centuries and more will rue this youthful flirtation with Romanism.

It was a court of politicians enforcing a policy, not a court of judges administering the law.