Angela Fernandez and Markus D
Dubber (eds),
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.
Angela Fernandez and Markus D Dubber are both professors at the
University of Toronto, Faculty of Law.
