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The changing face of private law: doctrinal categories and the regulatory state

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

N. E. Simmonds
N. E. Simmonds*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Extract

Legal scholars over the last 25 years or so have experienced a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the traditional classifications that segment university curricula and legal textbooks. Contract and tort, for instance, are felt to be not so different after all. The intimate historical links between the tort of negligence and the action of assumpsit may be seen as reflecting the realitics more truly than the later doctrinal separation of voluntarily and involuntarily incurred obligations. The growing impact of public law on the exercise of privatc rights, and the interweaving of public and private law that runs through an evcn greater portion of the legal system, cause still more fundamental doubts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Legal Studies , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , November 1982 , pp. 257 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Legal Scholars 1982

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References

1. Jolowicz, J. A. (ed.) The Division and Classification Of the Law (London, 1970)Google Scholar.

2. This claim cannot be levelled against the papers edited by Jolowicz op. cit. which are concerned with classification for the purposes or law reform. The importance of the discussion on legal education docs not go unnoticed, however: see e.g. Twining Ernie and the Centipede in Jolowicz op. cit. p. 19.

3. MacCormick, Neil Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory (Oxrord, 1978) pp. 106, 107, and Ch. 7Google Scholar.

4. See Fletcher, G. P. ‘Fairness and Utility in Tort Theory’ (1972) 85 Harvard Law Review 537 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Calabresi, ‘Some Thoughts on Risk Distribution in the Law of Torts’ (1961) 70 Yale Law Journal 499 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. See also, on the property/tort relationship: Calabresi, and Melamed, ‘Property Rules. Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral’ (1972) 85 Harvard Law Review 1089 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. The old treatment of the employment relationship as part of the law of ‘domestic relations’ (husband and wife, parent and child, guardian and ward, master and senant) is a good example: see Glendon, ‘The New Family and the New Property’ (1979) 53 Tulane Law Review 697 Google Scholar.

7. See Simpson, A. W. B. ‘The Rise and Fall of the Legal Treatise: Legal Principles and the Forms of Legal Literature’ (1981) 48 University of Chicago Law Review 632 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peter Stein ‘Continental Influences on English Legal Thought, 1600–1900’ (1977) 3 La Formazione Storica del Diritto Moderno in Europa, Atti del III Congresso Internazionale della Societa Italiana di Storia del Diritto 1105; Peter Stein ‘Legal Science During the Last Century: England’ in Inchieste di Diritto Comparato, 6 ed. by M. Rotondi (Padova 1976). Fifoot, C. H. S. Judge and Jurist in the Reign of Victoria (London, 1959) pp. 27–30 Google Scholar.

8. See Simpson op. cit. p. 677.

9. Jones, J. W. Historical Introduction to the Theoy of Law (Oxford, 1940) p. 4 Google Scholar: ‘By drawing a line between the ius publicum, and the ius privatum the Roman lawyers opened the way for juristic as opposed to political or ethical theory.’

10. (1981) I Oxford Journal of Legal Studies p. 1.

11. Op. cit. p. 3.

12. Loc. cit..

13. Simmonds ‘Law as a Rational Science’ (1980) Archiv für Rechts - und Sozialphilosophie p. 535.

14. Perhaps one could regard the work of the Post-Glossators as a decisive step away from the gloss and the formulary, and towards the rationalist writings of the seventeenth century. See Ullman, Walter, The Medieval Idea of Law as represented by Lucas de Penna (London, 1946)Google Scholar.

15. Nozick, Robert Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford, 1974) Ch. 7Google Scholar. But see also Simmonds op. cit. p. 547 n.22.

16. See Simmonds ‘Property, Autonomy and Welfare’ (1981) Archiv für Rechts - und Sozialphilosophie p. 61.

17. Milsom loc. cit..

18. Friedmann, W. Law, in a Changing Society (London. 1964) p. 71 Google Scholar.

19. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, translated by T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1952) S. 261, p. 161; Karl Marx ‘On the Jewish Question’ in Karl Marx: Early Writings, translated by Livingstone and Benton, and introduced by L. Colletti (London, 1975) pp. 232, 233: ‘What was the character of the old society?’ It can be characterized in one word: feudalism. ‘The old civil society had a directly political character, i.e. the elements of civil life such as property, family and the mode and manner of work were elevated in the form of seignory, estate and guild to the level of elements of political life. In this form they defined the relationship of the singlr individual to the state as a whole, i.e. his political relationship … The political revolution which overthrew this rule … abolished the political character of civil society … But the perfection of the idealism of the state was at the same time the perfection of the materialism of civil society.’

20. Parry, G. John Locke (London, 1978) p. 2, 3.Google Scholar

21. A similar approach was adopted in the Soviet Civil Code of 1922, but as Inga Markovits points out, this was ‘conceived as a bourgeois code, to be used temporarily for reasons of expediency’. See Markovits ‘Civil Law in East Germany - Its Development and Relation to Soviet Legal History and Ideology’ (1968) 78 Yale LJ 1 at p. 24.See also V. Gsovski Soviet Civil Law (Michigan, 1948) Vol I, pp. 24–34; Schlesinger, R. Soviet Legal Theory (London, 1945) pp. 92–97 Google Scholar. Relevant provisions from the bourgeois codes are conveniently set out in Gsovski op. cit. p. 556.

22. Friedmann op. cit. p. 72.

23. Steiner ‘Individual Liberty’ (1975) 75 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society p. 33. See also Steiner ‘The Structure of a Set of Compassihle Rights’ (1977) Journal of Philosoply p. 767.

24. Op. cit. p. 47.

25. Op. cit. p. 48.

26. Loc. cit..

27. See Day, J. P. ‘Threats, OfFers, Law, Opinion and Liberty’ (1977) 14 American Philosophical Quarterly p. 257 Google Scholar.

28. Luig ‘The Institutes of National Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ (1972) Juridical Review p. 193.

29. (1890) 134 US 418.

30. Commons, J. R. Legal Foundations of Capitalism (New York, 1924) p. 16 Google Scholar.

31. Lawson, F. H. The Law of Property (Oxford, 1958) pp. 22–23 Google Scholar.

32. Commentaries Vol II (1766) p. 2.

33. Simpson, introduction to Vol II of the University of Chicago facsimile of Blackstone's Commentaries (Chicago, 1979) pp. xii–xiii.

34. Knieper, R. ‘Property and Contract’ (1980) International Journal of the Sociology of Law 423 at p. 427, 428Google Scholar.

35. Note 29 above.

36. J. R. Commons op. cit. Chs 2 and 8.

37. Friedmann Op. cit. p. 87.

38. Reich ‘The New Property’ (1964) 73 Yale Law Journal 733.

39. Loc. Cit..

40. Reich op. cit. p. 779.

41. See Simmonds op. cit. n. 13 above.