"This book is concerned with the history of contract law over a two hundred year period stretching between 1670 and 1870. Inevitably it is also about how the Common law and Equity develops and evolves during that time"--

"This book is concerned with the history of contract law over a two hundred year period stretching between 1670 and 1870. Inevitably it is also about how the Common law and Equity develops and evolves during that time"--

The foundations for modern contract law were laid between 1670 and 1870. Rather than advancing a purely chronological account, this examination of the development of contract law doctrine in England during that time explores key themes in order to better understand the drivers of legal change. These themes include the relationship between lawyers and merchants, the role of equity, the place of statute, and the part played by legal literature. Developments are considered in the context of the legal system of the time and through those who were involved in litigation as lawyers, judges, jurors or litigants. It concludes that the way in which contract law developed was complex. Legal change was often uneven and slow, and some of the apparent changes had deep roots in the past. Clashes between conservative and more reformist tendencies were not uncommon.

English contract law provides the invisible framework that underpins and enables much contracting activity in society, yet the role of the law in policing many of our contracts now approaches vanishing point. The methods by which contracts come into existence, and notionally create binding obligations, have transformed over the past forty years. Consumers now enter into contracts through remote and automated processes on standard terms over which they have little control. This book explores the substantive weakening of the institution of contract law in a society heavily dependent on contracts. It considers significant areas of contracting activity that affect many people, but that escape serious and sustained legal scrutiny. An accessibly written and succinct account of contract law's past, present and future, it assesses the implications of a diminished contract law, and the possibilities, if any, for its revival.

This book considers the development of contract law doctrine in England from 1670 to 1870.

Law and Society in England 1750–1950 is an indispensable text for those wishing to study English legal history and to understand the foundations of the modern British state. In this new updated edition the authors explore the complex relationship between legal and social change. They consider the ways in which those in power themselves imagined and initiated reform and the ways in which they were obliged to respond to demands for change from outside the legal and political classes. What emerges is a lively and critical account of the evolution of modern rights and expectations, and an engaging study of the formation of contemporary social, administrative and legal institutions and ideas, and the road that was travelled to create them. The book is divided into eight chapters: Institutions and Ideas; Land; Commerce and Industry; Labour Relations; The Family; Poverty and Education; Accidents; and Crime. This extensively referenced analysis of modern social and legal history will be invaluable to students and teachers of English law, political science, and social history.

In Liberalizing Contracts Anat Rosenberg examines nineteenth-century liberal thought in England, as developed through, and as it developed, the concept of contract, understood as the formal legal category of binding agreement, and the relations and human practices at which it gestured, most basically that of promise, most broadly the capitalist market order. She does so by placing canonical realist novels in conversation with legal-historical knowledge about Victorian contracts. Rosenberg argues that current understandings of the liberal effort in contracts need reconstructing from both ends of Henry Maine's famed aphorism, which described a historical progress "from status to contract." On the side of contract, historical accounts of its liberal content have been oscillating between atomism and social-collective approaches, missing out on forms of relationality in Victorian liberal conceptualizations of contracts which the book establishes in their complexity, richness, and wavering appeal. On the side of status, the expectation of a move "from status" has led to a split along the liberal/radical fault line among those assessing liberalism's historical commitment to promote mobility and equality. The split misses out on the possibility that liberalism functioned as a historical reinterpretation of statuses – particularly gender and class – rather than either an effort of their elimination or preservation. As Rosenberg shows, that reinterpretation effectively secured, yet also altered, gender and class hierarchies. There is no teleology to such an account.

This volume revisits some of the key debates about the nature and shape of contract law, in light of the impact that statutes have had on its development. With contributions from leading contract law scholars, it fills a significant gap in existing theoretical and doctrinal analyses of contract law, which rely primarily on cases to put forward accounts of the general principles and structure of contract law. Statutory rules are, typically, seen as being specific instances of legal regulation that carve out exceptions to these general principles for specific reasons of policy. This treatment of these rules has resulted in an incomplete understanding of the nature of contract law and the principles that underpin it. By drawing specifically on contract statutes, the volume produces a more complete picture of modern contract law. A companion to the ground-breaking Tort Law and the Legislature: Common Law, Statute and the Dynamics of Legal Change (Hart Publishing, 2012) this collection will have a significant impact on the study of contract law.

"[This book provides an] account of the principles of the law of contract with...analysis and insights...Each topic is clearly signposted with summaries, introductory text and sub-headings for ease of navigation throughout the book. Numerous references to additional primary and secondary sources take the reader even further into the subject."--

Provides a fresh, topical and accessible account of the Australian law of contract.