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 volume honours the work and writings of Professor Sir John Baker over the past fifty years, presenting a collection of essays by leading scholars on topics relating to the sources of English legal history, the study of which Sir John has so much advanced. The essays range from the twelfth century to the nineteenth, considering courts (central and local), the professions (both common law and civilian), legal doctrine, learning, practice, and language, and the cataloguing of legal manuscripts. The sources addressed include court records, reports of litigation (in print and in manuscript), abridgements, fee books and accounts, conveyances and legal images. The volume advances understanding of the history of the common law and its sources, and by bringing together essays on a range of topics, approaches and periods, underlines the richness of material available for the study of the history of English law and indicates avenues for future research.

This volume honours the work and writings of Professor Sir John Baker over the past fifty years, presenting a collection of essays by leading scholars on topics relating to the sources of English legal history, the study of which Sir John has so much advanced. The essays range from the twelfth century to the nineteenth, considering courts (central and local), the professions (both common law and civilian), legal doctrine, learning, practice, and language, and the cataloguing of legal manuscripts. The sources addressed include court records, reports of litigation (in print and in manuscript), abridgements, fee books and accounts, conveyances and legal images. The volume advances understanding of the history of the common law and its sources, and by bringing together essays on a range of topics, approaches and periods, underlines the richness of material available for the study of the history of English law and indicates avenues for future research.

What shapes the development of a legal system? The economy? Legal ideas? Social and political movements? Drawing on the other eight volumes in the series, European Legal Development: The Case of Tort aims to challenge conventional comparative law explanations of the factors that shape the law. It goes further into ideas that law could be conceived as either driven by external factors or is primarily the product of deliberations among lawyers. Choosing the examples of product and medical liabilities, the book considers the convergence of developments across legal systems. By contrast, examining road accidents and relations between neighbours, it notes areas in which the development of tort law has diverged. Tort law emerges as only part of the legal response and its place depends on the activity of the legislator, as much as on judicial and scholarly ideas about the place of fault liability within the schemes of compensation.

This collection of papers from the Twentieth British Legal History Conference explores the relationship between substantive law and the way in which it actually worked. Instead of looking at what the courts said they were doing, it is concerned more with the reality of what was happening. To that end, the authors use a wide range of sources, from court records to merchants' diaries and lawyers' letters. The way in which the sources are used reflects the possibilities of legal historical research which are opening up in the twenty-first century, as large databases and digitised images - and even online auction sites - make it a practical possibility to do work at a level which was almost unthinkable only a short time ago.

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 evolves.