Accounts of the nature of legal authority typically focus on the authority of officially sanctioned rules issued by legally recognised bodies - legislatures, courts and regulators - that fit comfortably within traditional state-centred concepts of law. Such accounts neglect the more complex processes involved in acquiring legal authority.
Throughout the history of modern legal systems texts have come to acquire authority for legal officials without being issued by a legislature or a court. From Justinian's Institutes and Blackstone's Commentaries to modern examples such as the American...

Private law beyond the state is a topic that is fashionable, important, and widely discussed. Yet it presents so many different aspects and perspectives that it has, so far, remained remarkably poorly understood. Precisely because globalization moves the law beyond the state, lawyers find themselves forced to rethink private law and its relation to the state. This volume brings together contributions of leading scholars from the United States, Israel and Germany exploring the topic from different perspectives: legal history, law and economics, legal sociology, private international law, and...

This detailed description and comparative analysis of the development of tort law in Europe over the last 150 years is based on national reports that are structured by a basic questionnaire. The national reports are complemented with a comparative analysis of the parallel, though often diverging, developments in the different legal systems. It can clearly be seen that different groups in the legal systems, such as judges and scholars, often had diverging views on tort law that were translated into more specific doctrinal and evaluative statements. Accompanied by a general expansion of...