Anglo American Law Collections

This introductory text explores the historical origins of the main legal institutions that came to characterize the Anglo-American legal tradition, and to distinguish it from European legal systems. The book contains both text and extracts from historical sources and literature. The book is published in color, and contains over 250 illustrations, many in color, including medieval illuminated manuscripts, paintings, books and manuscripts, caricatures, and photographs.

Agency (1914) / Edward J. Hess -- Agency (1916) -- Constitutional law / Charles G. Neely -- Contracts (1914) / John D. Lawson -- Contracts (1917) -- Criminal law -- Evidence (1915) -- Evidence (1916) / Thornton Mills Pratt -- Legal ethics / Luther Laflin Mills -- Negotiable instruments (1915) -- Negotiable instruments (1917) / R.M. Bashford -- Personal rights / Charles L. Smith -- Pleading and practice / Walter Clark -- Real property / James Schouler -- Settlement of estates -- Personal rights -- Wills -- Wills and settlement of estates / Patrick B. Wolfe.

This volume is a comprehensive and authoritative collection of essays on Anglo-American legal history, written by some of the most prominent legal scholars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Covering topics ranging from the origins of English law to the development of American jurisprudence, these essays are essential reading for anyone interested in the history of law and legal thought. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

'Law Books in Action: Essays on the Anglo-American Legal Treatise' explores the history of the legal treatise in the common law world. Rather than looking at treatises as shortcuts from 'law in books' to 'law in action', the essays in this collection ask what treatises can tell us about what troubled legal professionals at a given time, what motivated them to write what they did, and what they hoped to achieve. This book, then, is the first study of the legal treatise as a 'law book in action', an active text produced by individuals with ideas about what they wanted the law to be, not a mere stepping-stone to codes and other forms of legal writing, but a multifaceted genre of legal literature in its own right, practical and fanciful, dogmatic and ornamental in turn. This book will be of interest to legal scholars, lawyers and judges, as well as to anyone else with a scholarly interest in law in general, and legal history in particular.