A number of household-name jurists sing the praises of this book in dust-jacket commendation. Richard Posner says it is “a work of massive but accessible legal scholarship” and “an indispensable resource”. George Berman sees the book as a masterpiece “showing how the act of giving has generated a wealth of legal issues and a panoply of solutions.” Reinhard Zimmermann describes it as “a piece of truly foundational research”.
The invitation to review a major new comparative work on gift immediately brought the thought that John P Dawson's 1978 Yale Storr Lectures on Jurisprudence, published in 1980 as Gifts and Promises: Continental and American Law Compared, would be a hard act to follow. Hyland describes the work of his precursor as “magnificent and magnificently flawed” and, inexplicably, adds: “[t]hough he was seventy-eight when he published … he had somehow managed to retain his astonishing mastery of the great systems of private law” (para 127).
Gifts is a remarkably wide-ranging work, especially in the perspectives it takes on the essentials of donation in systems representing the Anglo-American and civilian legal families. A multi-disciplinary study, the book brings in history, philosophy, economics, anthropology and sociology in its quest to understand the subject. This emphasis on breadth probably explains the author's view that his forerunner “had a tin ear for cultural context” (para 133). While Dawson's work is law for lawyers, Hyland's is much wider; indeed, the author describes it as “a continuation, by other means, of the work done by Malinowski, Mauss, and contemporary gift theorists” (para 198); another dust-jacket endorsement proclaims the book as “a must for anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and historians”. As a comparative law treatise the law in England, the United States, India, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Spain is considered. While the approach is interdisciplinary the book's structure is essentially legal. The eight chapters are on: the context of gift law, methodology, the legal concept of gift, gift capacity, the gift promise, making the gift, revocation and, finally, the place of the gift.
The perception of gift as something of a legal paradox operating in contexts not readily fitting an institutional framework is a theme of the book. This fits with the familiar point that functionalist analysis does not work where purpose and effectiveness questions make no sense because a particular position is explained by...
