This impressively comprehensive course book, weighing in at just under seven pounds, describes and explains the origins and development of English and American legal institutions (not legal doctrine) from Anglo-Saxon times to the present. It comprises text and textual notes, together with documents, a few cases, and excerpts from around two hundred scholarly articles and books. The volume takes full advantage of the considerable amount of scholarship produced in the last decades that has not only illuminated details but has limned more completely the arc that our legal institutions have described over the last ten centuries. There is a special focus on the ways in which common-law institutions differ from institutions that do the same or similar work on the Continent, and on the reasons for that divergence; so the volume pays much attention to the various incarnations of the jury over the centuries and to the law/equity division that continues to this day to perplex American lawyers and judges. The work also deals with the development of the legal profession, the importance of justices of the peace, the literature of the law, and legal education. And there is a fascinating treatment of the transformation of the civil and criminal trial process, including, most importantly, the gradual separation of law and fact that in an accretive process created whole bodies of law.

The comparatist strategy that the book frequently employs gives it much of its considerable strength and serves two purposes in the main, one more or less transcendental, the other practical: It releases students from the aura of inevitability that many law courses have about them (there are other ways to do things) and it brings into sharper relief the features of our present-day system so that it can be evaluated. This approach also gives the teacher a chance to describe the competition between the common-law courts and the conciliar courts and between the members of the respective legal professions. Though, as the authors emphasize, chancery survived because the version of the Roman-canon procedure developed there carried many procedural and remedial advantages that the English legal system came to see as indispensable, there was an uneasy relationship between the common lawyers and the civilians in England, a wariness that will make this book an excellent classroom tool, for the teacher can array archetypes of the two professions against each other: The practical, culture-bound common-law judge and practitioner versus the bookish, cosmopolitan doctor of the civil law (perhaps too long with the lamp). Common lawyers have been smarting from the deprecations of civilians at least since the late twelfth century (the author of Glanvill seems to be reacting to their needling), and the book does not pull punches in describing the shortcomings of the common law. But it also describes how fear of judging led civilians sometimes to resort to torture; and it includes a hilarious send-up, from Dickens's Bleak House, of the intolerable dilatoriness of chancery practice in the nineteenth century. The authors point out that even though Equity triumphed in many ways in the event, that did not happen before it was itself obliged to adopt the oral and public trial of the common law. So the evaluation of the two systems is evenhanded and each comes in for appropriate censure and criticism. If the book's appreciation of the utility of common-law cross-examination methods and juries might seem very occasionally a little harsh to one reader, that might well be because of his parochialism—a famous trait of the common-law judge.

A remarkable and unique feature of this superior book is the more than two hundred illustrations, most in color, that it contains. They range from a picture of an Anglo-Saxon king and his Witan to Myra Bradwell, from Lord Coke to Justice Thurgood Marshall. I have long thought that the tedium of the traditional text could usefully be relieved by the liberal use of illustrations, and it is a relief to see that these learned authors and editors agree. The text also features highlighted interpolations titled “The Living Law” that direct the reader's attention to modern-day connections to matters under discussion. Each chapter is preceded by a summary that will both orient readers and serve them for review purposes. In other words, this is an attractively designed and intelligently arranged work, and the amount of sheer engineering and elbow grease that went into its making is highly impressive. Lawyers and judges could greatly profit from reading this book, even without the guidance of a teacher, to heighten their appreciation of their legal system and the forces that work to shape and give it content.

This uncommonly clear-headed book, designed for a three-hour course, also offers occasional questions to tease readers into evaluating the material in a sophisticated way, rather than simply absorbing its substance. These questions are often provocative and challenging, and the answers to some of them seem far from obvious. The teachers' manual will no doubt provide a great deal of help to prospective instructors, experienced ones and neophytes alike.