Description
Book SynopsisIn this classic study, Alan Brudner investigates the basic structure of the common law of transactions. For decades, that structure has been the subject of intense debate between formalists, who say that transactional law is a private law for interacting parties, and functionalists, who say that it is a public law serving the collective ends of society. Against both camps, Brudner proposes a unity of formalism and functionalism in which private law is modified by a common good without being subservient to it. Drawing on Hegel''s legal philosophy, the author exhibits this unity in each of transactional law''s main divisions: property, contract, unjust enrichment, and tort. Each is a whole composed of private-law and public-law parts that complement each other, and the idea connecting the parts to each other is also latently present in each. Moreover, Brudner argues, a single narrative thread connects the divisions of transactional law to each other. Not a row of disconnected fields, tra
Trade ReviewBy translating the theoretical content of Hegel's Philosophy of Right into a modern idiom, by applying Hegel's political theory to the detail of modern common law doctrine, and by using that theory to critique and relativize the leading schools of legal theory in each of the main branches of law, Brudner has made an unrivalled contribution to legal theory. * Peter Ramsay, London School of Economics and Political Science, Critical Analysis of Law *
The publication of a revised edition of Alan Brudner's The Unity of the Common Law deserves an intellectual celebration. Brudner's book is a tour de force of Hegelian jurisprudence. It offers a profound-and profoundly challenging-account of private law (or, as he calls it, transactional law) in its entirety as well as no less ambitious accounts of the nature of both adjudication and legal theory, and a harsh critique of both formalism and functionalism. * Hanoch Dagan, Tel Aviv University, Critical Analysis of Law *
Table of ContentsPART 1; PART 2; PART 3
