The Historical Roots of English Land Law. Originally published: London: Oxford University Press, 1927. xxiv, 339 pp. One of the most distinguished historians of English common law, Holdsworth produced this manual to provide students of real property with a concise history of the field. This background was necessary, he argued, because contemporary land law was hard to comprehend apart from its history. "[Holdsworth] has cheerfully carried through the task of giving us an elementary survey of one part of the vast subject in the mastery of which he stands alone. Most writers of manuals have to popularize the results of the labour of others; Professor Holdsworth need pillage few storehouses but his own." --Law Quarterly Review 44: (1928) 105. William S. Holdsworth [1871-1944] was a professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Cambridge from 1903-1966 and became the Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford in 1922. He is well-known for his monumental A History of English Law (1903-1966) and other works, such as Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian (1929) and Some Makers of English Law (1938).

Basically a revised edition of [the author's] A preliminary survey of the law of real property.

The civil law systems of continental Europe, Latin America and other parts of the world, including Japan, share a common legal heritage derived from Roman law. However, it is an inheritance which has been modified and adapted over the centuries as a result of contact with Germanic legal concepts, the work of jurists in the mediaeval universities, the growth of the canon law of the western Church, the humanist scholarship of the Renaissance and the rationalism of the natural lawyers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This volume provides a critical appreciation of modern civilian systems by examining current rules and structures in the context of their 2,500 year development. It is not a narrative history of civil law, but an historical examination of the forces and influences which have shaped the form and the content of modern codes, as well as the legislative and judicial processes by which they are created are administered.

This book surveys the leading modern theories of property - Lockean, libertarian, utilitarian/law-and-economics, personhood, Kantian and human flourishing - and then applies those theories to concrete contexts in which property issues have been especially controversial. These include redistribution, the right to exclude, regulatory takings, eminent domain and intellectual property. The book highlights the Aristotelian human flourishing theory of property, providing the most comprehensive and accessible introduction to that theory to date. The book's goal is neither to cover every conceivable theory nor to discuss every possible facet of the theories covered. Instead, it aims to make the major property theories comprehensible to beginners, without sacrificing accuracy or sophistication. The book will be of particular interest to students seeking an accessible introduction to contemporary theories of property, but even specialists will benefit from the book's lucid descriptions of contemporary debates.