Holdsworth proves that historians should study the novels of Charles Dickens as source material about the workings of English law and legal institutions. He shows how Bleak House highlights the procedures of the Court of Chancery, and Pickwick Papers illuminates the procedure of the common law. The addresses contained in this book were delivered in the William L. Storrs Lecture Series, 1927, before the Law School of Yale University. "The distinguished English historian, Professor Holdsworth, has contrived even during his moments of recreation to render us his debtors. No two books outside the...

The Historical Roots of English Land Law. Originally published: London: Oxford University Press, 1927. xxiv, 339 pp. One of the most distinguished historians of English common law, Holdsworth produced this manual to provide students of real property with a concise history of the field. This background was necessary, he argued, because contemporary land law was hard to comprehend apart from its history.
" Holdsworth] has cheerfully carried through the task of giving us an elementary survey of one part of the vast subject in the mastery of which he stands alone. Most writers of manuals...

Beginning with Coke and Selden, Holdsworth surveys the work of the great practitioners of Anglo-American legal history.
Originally published: New York: Columbia University Press, 1928. 175 pp. "In this reprint of lectures delivered by the learned author in the United States of America, the course of the literature of Anglo-American legal history is portrayed in an illuminating fashion. Pursuing a chronological sequence, the lectures survey the effect of the historical tradition of the common lawyers before legal history began to be written, in which class the learned author puts the work...

xv, 302 pp. Originally published: Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1946. Compiled and edited by A.L. Goodhart and H.G. Hanbury, editors of the last four volumes of Holdsworth's History of English Law, this volume presents a selection of seventeen essays by the great legal scholar. Highlights from his long and prolific career, they address such topics as martial law, the English constitution, case law, equity, trusts, libel, law reporting, contracts and land law.
"These essays tend to enlarge the mind and to stir the imagination. They are the work of one of the most distinguished of the...