Charles Donahue
In this book the greatest living English legal historian sums up a lifetime of work. Professor Milsom here makes explicit what has been implicit in much of his previous writing: the mechanisms by which the English common law developed. Students of the law and of its history will welcome the clarity and vigor with which Milsom expounds his general ideas and will need to think long and hard about the extent to which these mechanisms also account for the development of Roman law and, perhaps, other legal systems as well.
Charles Donahue, Harvard Law School
Morris Sheppard Arnold
This is not just 'legal history,' but an extended and brilliantly sustained jurisprudential meditation on the natural, informal, and unregulated processes by which the English common law produced its rules and evolved. Prof. Milsom's life-long argument with Maitland has yielded a narrative that, because of its coherence and power, is sure to become the orthodox account.
Morris Sheppard Arnold, United States Circuit Judge