Dimensions of Private Law
Categories and Concepts in Anglo-American Legal Reasoning

This book considers the inherent complexities of private law; relevant to property, tort, contract, legal method and legal theory.

Stephen Waddams (Author)

9780521016698, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 10 July 2003

272 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.4 kg

'… a work of fine scholarship that demonstrates detailed knowledge of a wide range of historical sources and offers many illuminating insights.' Ken Oliphant, Cardiff University

Anglo-American private law (the law governing mutual rights and obligations of individuals) has been a far more complex phenomenon than is usually recognized. Attempts to reduce it to a single explanatory principle, or to a precisely classified or categorized map, scheme, or diagram, are likely to distort the past by omitting or marginalizing material inconsistent with proposed principles or schemes. Many legal issues cannot be allocated exclusively to one category. Often several concepts have worked concurrently and cumulatively, so that competing explanations and categories are not so much alternatives, of which only one can be correct, as different dimensions of a complex phenomenon, of which several may be simultaneously valid and necessary. This study will be of importance to those interested in property, tort, contract, unjust enrichment, legal reasoning, legal method, the history of the common law, and the relation between legal theory and legal history.

1. Introduction: the mapping of legal concepts
2. Johanna Wagner and the Rival Opera Houses
3. Economic harms
4. Reliance
5. Liability for physical harms
6. Profits derived from wrongs
7. Domestic obligations
8. Inter-relation of obligations
9. Property and obligation
10. Public interest and private right
11. Conclusion: the concept of legal mapping.

Subject Areas: Torts / Delicts [LNV], Defamation law [slander & libel LNJD], Contract law [LNCJ], Laws of Specific jurisdictions [LN], Legal skills & practice [LAS], Common law [LAFC], Jurisprudence & philosophy of law [LAB]