This introductory text explores the historical origins of the main legal institutions that came to characterize the Anglo-American legal tradition, and to distinguish it from European legal systems. The book contains both text and extracts from historical sources and literature. The book is published in color, and contains over 250 illustrations, many in color, including medieval illuminated manuscripts, paintings, books and manuscripts, caricatures, and photographs.

This book explores the foundations and evolution of modern corporate fiduciary law in the United States and the United Kingdom. Today US and UK fiduciary law provide very different approaches to the regulation of directorial behaviour. However, as the book shows, the law in both jurisdictions borrowed from the same sources in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English fiduciary and commercial law. The book identifies the shared legal foundations and authorities and explores the drivers of corporate fiduciary law's contemporary divergence. In so doing it challenges the prevailing accounts of corporate legal change and stability in the US and the UK.

The authors have retained most of the original text with revisions to reflect new developments, while adding edited reports of many new cases. The new cases emphasize recent decisions of the United States Supreme Court, but also include an eclectic group of decisions by state appellate courts. Instructors who wish to introduce students to the case method of legal analysis will find they have ample resources to do so; instructors who wish to emphasize textual description of the key features of the Anglo-American legal system will find all the necessary materials still at hand, and may pretermit the illustrative cases as they see fit.

Deals with the Professional Tradition of the historical development of English law as it influences the historians of Anglo-American law.