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Peter Birks, THE ROMAN LAW OF OBLIGATIONS. Ed Eric Descheemaeker Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.com ), 2014. xxvii + 303 pp. ISBN 9780198719274. £50.

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 January 2015
Pages150-151
Date01 January 2015
DOI10.3366/elr.2015.0261

The first volume to be published in a series called “The Collected Papers of Peter Birks”, The Roman Law of Obligations contains the text behind lectures delivered to students in their first year of study at the University of Edinburgh in 1982. The inevitable question, which will no doubt recur as the series continues, is whether a piece of writing the author did not manage – or even try – to have published during his lifetime should be put into print posthumously. An immediate answer, which goes some way towards easing anxieties about the flouting of the author's wishes, is that these lectures were in a sense published before he died. Quite apart from their oral presentation to students, “the fact that a copy was deposited at the time in the law library of his institution indicates that Birks expected them to be read by others” (xxvi). Those were the days, apparently, in which authors could reasonably expect what they wrote to be read, and also in which lecturers could expect their listeners to be comfortable with the constant use of male examples and masculine pronouns, to have some familiarity with Latin, to grasp the point of a comparison between “Bordeaux Supérieur” and “Château Cissac 1975”, and to need it explained that in exceptional circumstances a student who unwrapped a Christmas present to find a copy of Walker's Principles might actually feel disappointed (69 and 71). That travel might be arranged with “British Rail” already seems sadly dated, though “Hertz” and “Avis” are still with us (97 and 144; the wheeze on the west coast in the early 1980s was that Hertz Van Rental had been signed to play for Celtic, the only club then that would have attempted anything so exotic). Did Birks really write “rôle” with a circumflex? If so, it added to the faintly antique flavour his text has already acquired after barely thirty years.

It is partly as a period piece that the lectures have been printed. Future historians will be grateful for the glimpse they provide of legal education in the later twentieth century, and anyone working on an intellectual biography of this influential author will find it illuminating to have an indication of his thinking on obligations around the time the focus of his attention was shifting from Roman law to modern restitution. More immediately, the lectures stimulate speculation on what Birks might have written about Roman law had he not devoted as much time as he did to modern law, or had his life not been cut so tragically...

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