Introduction: two Oxford handbooks on the history of law

Abstract

You wait ages for a bus, the saying goes, and then two (or three) come along at once. A similar feeling set in when Oxford University Press published two volumes on legal history in its Oxford Handbooks series within the space of four weeks last year. They are a welcome addition to the prestigious and well-established series that now boasts hundreds of volumes, including around 50 on history and over three dozen on law. The latter do not only cover established sub-disciplines of legal studies, such as jurisprudence and philosophy of law (2002), comparative law (2006, 2nd ed. 2019), international trade law (2009), the law of the sea (2015), European Union law (2015), criminal law (2014) and intellectual property (2018), but also more recent and emerging fields, including international environmental law (2007), empirical legal research (2010), behavioural economics and law (2014), international adjudication (2013), international climate change law (2016) and law and economics (3 vols., 2017). The Handbooks have become increasingly specialised with titles focusing on narrow topics such as individual national constitutions (USA, 2015; India, 2016; Canada, 2017) and important, but nevertheless discrete legal issues, for example, US health law (2017) and the sources of international law (2017). The obvious question was why, nearly two decades after the launch of the series, there was such a thing as an Oxford Handbook of American Sports Law (2018) but still no volume on the history of law. The absence of such a title was all the more striking in light of the publication of books in the series dealing with individual fields of legal history, such as the Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (2012), the Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society (2016), the Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (2017) and the Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500–1700 (2017). .