Introduction: Putting the Legal Treatise in Its Place
Angela Fernandez and Markus D Dubber
1. Historicising Blackstone's Commentaries on The Laws of England: Difference and Sameness in Historical Time
Kunal M Parker
2. 'Of Institutes and Treatises': Blackstone's Commentaries, Kent's Commentaries and Murdoch's Epitome of the Laws of Nova-Scotia
Philip Girard
3. Tapping Reeve, Coverture and America's First Legal Treatise
Angela Fernandez
4. Story'd Paradigms for the Nineteenth-Century Display of Anglo-American Legal Doctrine
G Blaine Baker
5. A Province of Jurisprudence?: Invention of a Law of Constitutional Conventions
Roman J Hoyos
6. Nineteenth-Century Treatises on English Contract Law
Stephen Waddams
7. Of Treatises and Textbooks: The Literature of the Criminal Law in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Lindsay Farmer
8. Truth and Privilege: Libel Treatises and the Transmission of Legal Norms in the Early Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American World
Lyndsay Campbell
9. Renovate or Rebuild? Treatises, Digests and Criminal Law Codification
Barry Wright
10. A Low Law Counter Treatise? Absentees' to 'Wreck' in British North America's First Justice of the Peace Manual
Jim Phillips
11. Commentary: Effects of Scale: Toward a History of the Literature of Law
Christopher Tomlins

This book explores the history of the legal treatise in the common law world.

In doing so the book considers what treatises can tell us about what troubled legal professionals at a given time, what motivated them to write what they did, and what they hoped to achieve.

This 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 and therefore a multifaceted genre of literature in its own right.

This book will be of interest to legal scholars, lawyers, and judges, as well as to anyone else with a scholarly interest in law in general, and legal history in particular.