David Ibbetson exposes the historical layers beneath the modern rules and principles of contract, tort, and unjust enrichment. Small-scale changes caused by lawyers successfully exploiting procedural advantages in their clients' interest are described and analyzed.

The English law of obligations has developed over most of the last millennium without any major discontinuity. Through this period each generation has built on the law of its predecessors, manipulating it so as to avoid its more inconvenient consequences and adapting it piecemeal to social and economic changes. Sometimes fragments borrowed from other jurisdiction have been incorporated into the fabric of English law; from time to time ideas developed elsewhere have, at least temporarily, imposed a measure of structure on a common law otherwise messy and inherently resistant to any stable ordering. In this book David Ibbetson exposes the historical layers beneath the modern rules and principles of contract, tort, and unjust enrichment. Small-scale changes caused by lawyers successfully exploiting procedural advantages in their clients' interest are juxtaposed alongside changes caused by friction along the boundaries of these principal legal categories; fossilized remnants of old doctrines jostle with newer ideas in a state of half-consistent tension; loose-knit rules of equity developed in the Chancery infiltrate themselves into more tightly controlled Common law structures.;The result is a system shot through with inconsistencies and illogicalities, but with the resilience to adapt as necessary to take account of shifting pressures and changing circumstances.

Publisher:

USA Oxford University Press

ISBN:

9780198764120

Publication date:

February 2002

Length:

152mm

Width:

229mm

Thickness:

24mm

Weight:

685g

Pages:

352

Readership:

Professional & scholarly

A remarkable book which every lawyer with any interest in the law of obligations should read. --Peter Can
This is a great work of legal history by a quite exceptional scholar. Every legal historain will recognise the magnitude of its achievement. However, it is extraordinarily important that it should not be seen as only legal history. We have never had a better path to thorough understanding of the modern law of obligations in the common law. Every university jurist who teaches all or part of that area of the law must digest the learning of this book. -- Peter Birks