Review of Paul Mitchell, A History of Tort Law 1900-1950 (Cambridge: CUP, 2015)

Abstract

A book review of A History of Tort Law 1900-1950, by Paul Mitchell.

Historically-aware private lawyers are bound to approach this new book by Paul Mitchell with a sense of trepidation. They will, of course, already know the author to be one of Britain’s finest scholars of private law, both in its modern guise and its historical substrate. His previous books, in particular The Making of the Modern Law of Defamation (2005) and his series of Landmark Cases (on restitution, contract, tort and equity, all co-edited with Charles Mitchell), exemplified the way a meticulous examination of the past can shed considerable light on our understanding of the present: one of the main reasons why today’s lawyers – all of them – should be interested in legal materials that are no longer authoritative and legal actors who have long been dead.