This book is an analytical study of the current English law of traditional contracts of employment and of other personal employment contracts. Concentrating on the common law basis of individual employment law, it takes full account of relevant British and European Community legislation up to and including the Employment Act 2002, and considers the impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 and of the developing law of human and social rights more generally. In this work the author has up-dated and built upon his earlier treatise on the Contract of Employment published in 1975. The present work takes account of the very considerable amount of case-law, legislation and legal writing which has affected the law of the contract of employment since the earlier treatise was written. However, the present work aims to do more than providing a second edition of The Contract of Employment. It addresses a wider range of employment relationships than the previous work did; in fact, it argues for and is constructed around a whole new category of employment contracts, which includes not only contracts of employment but also other "personal employment contracts", a concept which the author articulates and justifies. Within that novel conceptual framework, many of the major features of the law of employment contracts are re-examined and presented in unfamiliar and challenging terms. Thus, the employer is re-conceptualized as the "employing enterprise", the bilateral structure of employment contracts is re-evaluated, and new explanations are advanced for the functioning of the law of termination of employment contracts and of remedies for wrongful termination.

The new Liberty Fund edition of "The Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke" includes selections from the four volumes of the "Institutes" and cases from the "Reports," and several of Coke's speeches in Parliament. Taken together, these writings delineate the origin and nature of the modern common law and indicate the profound interrelationship in the English tradition of custom, common law, authority (of both Crown and Commons), and individual liberty. Coke's great law books and speeches are well represented on Magna Carta, citizenship, habeas corpus, freedom from wrongful search and arrest, the origins of law, judicial review, administrative law, judging, criminal law, the moral obligations of officials, the powers of King, Parliament, church, and the law, property and rights, and the profession and study of law. "The Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke" is the first anthology of his works ever published.Steve Sheppard is a professor at the School of Law, University of Arkansas. He writes on constitutional history and theory, legal history, property law, and general jurisprudence, and he has edited "The History of Legal Education" (Salem Press, 1998).Click here for a pdf of the "Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke" brochure

This work traces the history of the English Law of obligations from the twelfth century to the present day. It aims to cut through technicalities and to be comprehensible to readers other than specialist legal historians. It should be of interest to all those wanting to understand how the English Common law has revolved.

This book offers a collection of essays by arguably the most popular legal historian writing today. Most of the essays have not been previously published, and those which have appeared previously have been re-written to make the collection read more coherently. The collection is centred upon the theme of the leading case - a case where the judgment has established a long-lasting or far-reaching precedent in Common Law, and the author has selected a number of these cases in order to illustrate how the precedents established by the cases had little or nothing to do with the trials themselves.

Much of our law is based on authoritative texts, such as constitutions and statutes. The common law, in contrast, is that part of the law that is established by the courts. Common law rules predominate in some areas of law, such as torts and contracts, and are extremely important in other areas, such as corporations. Nevertheless, it has been far from clear what principles courts use-or should use-in establishing common law rules. In this lucid yet subtly argued book, Melvin Eisenberg develops the principles that govern this process. The rules established in every common law case, he shows, are a product of the interplay between the rules announced in past precedents, on the one hand, and moral norms, policies, and experience, on the other. However, a court establishing a common law rule is not free, as a legislator would be, to employ those norms and policies it thinks best. Rather, it can properly employ only those that have a requisite degree of social support. More specifically, the common law should seek to satisfy three standards. First, it should correspond to the body of rules that would be arrived at by giving appropriate weight to all moral norms, policies, and experiential propositions that have the requisite support, and by making the best choices where norms, policies, and experience conflict. Second, all the rules that make up the body of the law should be consistent with one another. Third, the rules adopted in past precedents should be applied consistently over time. Often, these three standards point in the same direction. The central problems of legal reasoning arise when they do not. These problems are resolved by the principles of common law adjudication. With the general principles of common law adjudication as a background, the author then examines and explains the specific modes of common law reasoning, such as reasoning from precedent, reasoning by analogy, drawing distinctions, and overruling. Throughout the book, the analysis is fully illustrated by leading cases. This innovative and carefully worked out account of the common law will be of great interest to lawyers, law students, students in undergraduate legal studies programs, scholars interested in legal theory, and all those who want to understand the basic legal institutions of our society.