Table of Contents

I. Making Law: Lawyers and Laymen II. Changing Law III. Management, Custom, and Law IV. History and Lost Assumptions Notes Index

Promotional Information

How does law come to be stated as substantive rules, and then how does it change? One of Britain's most acclaimed legal historians focuses on the development of English common law-the intellectually coherent system of substantive rules that courts bring to bear on the particular facts of individual cases-from which American law was to grow.

About the Author

S. F. C. Milsom is professor emeritus of law at Cambridge University and the author of many books, including Historical Foundations of the Common Law and Legal Framework of English Feudalism. The recipient of the Harvard Law School's Ames Prize and the Royal Society of Arts' Swiney Prize, Milsom is past president of the Selden Society, a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. He has been a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge since 1976.

Reviews

In this book the greatest living English legal historian sums up a lifetime of work. Professor Milsom here makes explicit what has been implicit in much of his previous writing: the mechanisms by which the English common law developed. Students of the law and of its history will welcome the clarity and vigor with which Milsom expounds his general ideas and will need to think long and hard about the extent to which these mechanisms also account for the development of Roman law and, perhaps, other legal systems as well.