Richard Hyland, GIFTS. A STUDY IN COMPARATIVE LAW Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.com), 2009. xxi + 708 pp. ISBN 9780195343366. £80.

Document Cited in Related
AuthorDavid Carey Miller
DOI10.3366/elr.2011.0009
Published date01 January 2011
Date01 January 2011
Pages146-148

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...

Get this document and AI-powered insights with a free trial of vLex and Vincent AI

Get Started for Free

Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant

  • Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database

  • Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength

  • Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities

  • Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting

vLex

Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant

  • Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database

  • Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength

  • Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities

  • Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting

vLex

Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant

  • Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database

  • Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength

  • Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities

  • Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting

vLex

Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant

  • Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database

  • Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength

  • Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities

  • Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting

vLex

Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant

  • Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database

  • Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength

  • Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities

  • Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting

vLex

Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant

  • Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database

  • Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength

  • Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities

  • Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting

vLex

Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant

  • Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database

  • Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength

  • Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities

  • Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting

vLex
Add as a preferred source on Google