Law Books in Action : Essays on the Anglo-American Legal Treatise.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (262 pages)
Prelims -- Contents -- Contributors -- Introduction: Putting the Legal Treatise in Its Place -- 1. Historicising Blackstone's Commentaries on The Laws of England -- 2. 'Of Institutes and Treatises': Blackstone's Commentaries, Kent's Commentaries and Murdoch's Epitome of the Laws of Nova-Scotia -- 3. Tapping Reeve, Coverture and America's First Legal Treatise -- 4. Story'd Paradigms for the Nineteenth-Century Display of Anglo-American Legal Doctrine -- 5. A Province of Jurisprudence?: Invention of a Law of Constitutional Conventions -- 6. Nineteenth-Century Treatises on English Contract Law -- 7. Of Treatises and Textbooks: the Literature of the Criminal Law in Nineteenth-Century Britain -- 8. Truth and Privilege: Libel Treatises and the Transmission of Legal Norms in the Early Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American World -- 9. Renovate or Rebuild? Treatises, Digests and Criminal Law Codification -- 10. A Low Law Counter Treatise? 'Absentees' to 'Wreck' in British North America's First Justice of the Peace Manual -- 11. Commentary: Effects of Scale: Toward a History of the Literature of Law -- Index.
The essays in this collection explore the history of the legal treatise in the common law world, and 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.