Law Commons^™

Roman Law And English Law: Two Patterns Of Legal Development, Alan Watson

Scholarly Works

It is commonplace among scholars to link in thought the growth of Roman law and of English law. S.F.C. Milsom begins his distinguished Historical Foundations of the Common Law with the words: "It has happened twice only that the customs of European peoples were worked up into intellectual systems of law; and much of the world today is governed by laws derived from the one or the other." More strikingly, some scholars see an essential similarity in legal approaches in the two systems. Fritz Pringsheim entitled a well-known article The Inner Relationship Between English and Roman Law. W.W. Buckland and …

The First Great Law & Economics Movement, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Beginning in the 1880s American economists turned their attention to the law in a way unprecedented in American thought. Some legal academics in turn incorporated economics into their thinking about the law. Whether their output or its impact were great enough to warrant calling their efforts a law and economics "movement" is worth debating. This essay argues that there was such a movement.

Four things account for the increasing interest in law and economics at the turn of the century: (1) the widespread application of evolutionary models to the development of both law and economic theory; (2) the influence of …