Law Books in Action explores the history of the legal treatise in the common law world. Rather than looking at treatises as shortcuts from 'law in books' to 'law in action, ' the essays in this collection ask what treatises can tell us about the issues that troubled legal professionals at a given time, what motivated them to write what they did, and what they hoped to achieve. This book, then, is the first study of the legal treatise as a 'law book in action, ' an active text produced by individuals with ideas about what they wanted the law to be - not a mere stepping-stone to codes and other...