David Ibbetson
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198764113
- eISBN:
- 9780191709852
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198764113.001.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Law of Obligations, Legal History
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, ...
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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 jurisdictions 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. The book 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.Less
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 jurisdictions 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. The book 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.
Peter Birks
Eric Descheemaeker (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780198719274
- eISBN:
- 9780191788543
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198719274.001.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Law of Obligations, Legal History
This volume, the first in the Collected Papers of Peter Birks series, contains notes on a series of lectures on the Roman law of obligations which were delivered in Edinburgh in 1982. Their ...
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This volume, the first in the Collected Papers of Peter Birks series, contains notes on a series of lectures on the Roman law of obligations which were delivered in Edinburgh in 1982. Their posthumous publication gives, for the first time, a comprehensive insight into Birks’ views on the topic, which are relevant not only in a Roman context but also from a modern English perspective. The book examines, in turn, the law of contracts with its general principles and the rules applicable to each of the transactions mentioned in the Institutes; then the law of delicts with its three main pillars (theft, loss wrongfully caused and iniuria-contempt); finally the miscellany of residual obligations from which the later categories of quasi-contracts and quasi-delicts, but also the modern law of unjust enrichment, emerged.Less
This volume, the first in the Collected Papers of Peter Birks series, contains notes on a series of lectures on the Roman law of obligations which were delivered in Edinburgh in 1982. Their posthumous publication gives, for the first time, a comprehensive insight into Birks’ views on the topic, which are relevant not only in a Roman context but also from a modern English perspective. The book examines, in turn, the law of contracts with its general principles and the rules applicable to each of the transactions mentioned in the Institutes; then the law of delicts with its three main pillars (theft, loss wrongfully caused and iniuria-contempt); finally the miscellany of residual obligations from which the later categories of quasi-contracts and quasi-delicts, but also the modern law of unjust enrichment, emerged.
International Law's Objects
Humans as a Service
Money in the Western Legal Tradition
Practising Virtue
Comparative Succession Law
The Thin Justice of International Law
Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights
Courts in Conflict
Crimes of Terror
