Sarah Worthington, Andrew Robertson and Graham Virgo (eds), Revolution and Evolution in Private Law

Author
DOI10.3366/elr.2019.0566
Published date01 May 2019
Date01 May 2019
Pages295-297

The published fruit of the eighth biennial conference on the law of obligations, these essays are arranged under its themes of “evolution and revolution” in private law. Given its more dynamic essence, it is perhaps unsurprising that the chapters appear at first glance from their titles to be more concerned with revolutions than they are with evolution. However, most chapters are tentative at best about recognising or identifying clear revolutions in private law, with most preferring the rather safer ground of evolution as both their account and objective.

Although there are potentially competing understandings of the term revolution, the touchstone of the text is “a general sense of ‘important change’”, by which the content of the terms “revolution”, “evolution” and “paradigm shift” are to be identified. The imperative of definitional flexibility to bring a rather disparate set of topics takes precedence over precision. The editors' characterisation of the “staccato findings” across the contributors' chapters acknowledges this, though they fairly advance an unsurprising (at least in the context of a Common Law, precedent-based, tradition) tripartite set of influences on legal development: the design of creative legal instruments by parties and their lawyers, raising proceedings in fact appropriate cases, and fostering the creation of new precedents by original and persuasive argument. Understandably, the focus and emphasis of the papers then split across a number of different ways to understand...

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