Classification and the Crisis of the Common Law
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00130 |
| Author | David Campbell |
| Published date | 01 September 1999 |
| Date | 01 September 1999 |
THE CLASSIFICATION OF OBLIGATIONS
, ed. P. BIRKS
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, xxv and 304 pp., £50.00)
This book is the result of one of the many services rendered to the Society
of Public Teachers of Law (SPTL) by its former Honorary Secretary, Peter
Birks of All Souls, namely, the holding at All Souls of a series of SPTL
seminars, the last three of which were on ‘Pressing Problems in the Law.’
In this book are published the five papers given at the final seminar on ‘The
Classification of Obligations’ and five other papers on that theme. It is (no
doubt intendedly) fitting that this seminar was the last, for at it some
attempt was made to indicate a general remedy for the various lacunae in
the classical understanding and teaching principally of contract and tort
which were addressed in the earlier seminars. This authoritative book is
probably the best single statement of what many of this country’s finest
minds working on the law of obligations have to offer as such a remedy.
This remedy is doctrinal reclassification. Believing that ‘Anyone who is
seriously concerned to teach others about what our . . . obligations . . . are
needs a good list of those obligations’ (p. 71) and that ‘The classification of
obligations is an integral part of the production of good lists of our oblig-
ations’, Nicholas McBride (‘Classification and Legal Education’, ch. 4)
argues that ‘The classification of obligations is . . . central to the work of
any academic who is seriously concerned to teach others about what our
obligations are’ (p. 89). McBride’s prose is, as usual, highly evocative of
that style of philosophy in which protracted chains of dry and apparently
unobjectionable statements actually carry a highly contentious hidden bur-
den, and what he evidently means by ‘classification’ is what one might get
up to in the library with a lot of reports as more or less one’s only resource.
I will call this method ‘abstract doctrinal scholarship’.
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
* Professor, Cardiff Law School, P.O. Box 427, Cardiff CF10 3XJ, Wales
369
Classification and the Crisis of the Common Law
DAVID CAMPBELL*
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