A history of tort law 1900-1950

Author / Creator

Mitchell, Paul, 1972- author

Available as

Physical

Summary

"Many of the defining features of the modern law of tort can be traced to the first half of the twentieth century, but, until now, developments in that period have never received a dedicated histor...

"Many of the defining features of the modern law of tort can be traced to the first half of the twentieth century, but, until now, developments in that period have never received a dedicated historical examination. This book examines both common law and statutory innovations, paying special attention to underlying assumptions about the operation of society, the function of tort law, and the roles of those involved in legal changes. It recovers the legal and social contexts in which some landmark decisions were given (and which puts those decisions in a very different light) and draws attention to significant and suggestive cases that have fallen into neglect. It also explores the theoretical debates of the period about the nature of tort law, and reveals the fascinating patterns of influence and power at work behind statutory initiatives to reform the law"--

"Any title containing dates immediately raises questions: why start there?, why stop then? When the answer is not immediately obvious - the start and end of a monarch's reign, say, or a war - there may be little consolation in the reader's discovering that the contents of such books almost always break their titles' implicit promises to confine themselves to events between certain dates. So it might be as well to come clean right at the very start, and admit that nothing special or symbolic happened in either 1900 or 1950 that will serve as the beginning and end points of this book. Indeed, in a discipline like law where so much turns on interpreting what has happened in the past, a pedantically strict attitude to start dates is always likely to create more problems than it solves. As readers may have guessed from the suspiciously round numbers in the title, this is a book about the history of tort law that focuses on the first half of the twentieth century, but has no hesitation in straying slightly outside the period where the subject-matter calls for it"--

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