• Part I. The Common Law is Different: Ten Illustrations: 1. The ambiguity of the term 'law'; 2. Appeal: a recent development; 3. English law is a 'seamless web'; 4. The rule of exclusion; 5. A land without a constitution?; 6. The consequences of parliamentary absolutism; 7. The haphazard development of criminal law; 8. Prosecution and verdict in criminal trials; 9. A law uncodified; Jurists are dispensable; Part II. The Mastery of the Law: Judges, Legislators and Professors: 10. Some facts; 11. Explanations: the 'national spirit'?; 12. Explanations: authoritarian Roman law and democratic England?; 13. Explanations: political history; Part III. The Divergent Paths of Common Law and Civil Law: 14. Common law and civil law: the parting of the ways; 15. The ways remain separate; 16. Which diverged from which?; Part VI. Which is Best, Case Law, Statute Law, Or Book Law: 17. The judges: amateurs and professionals; 18. The courts and their creators; 19. Codification: a weapon against the judiciary; 20. Law professors serve the powers that be; 21. Eight criteria of good law.

'In Judges, Legislators and Professors Professor Raoul van Caenegem, a Belgian scholar who for many years has brought his knowledge of European legal history to some of the most intractable problems of early Common Law, sets out many instances where English law stands apart from the mainstream of western legal culture ... van Caenegem sees the distinctions as the result of essentially political developments which have meant that, at the critical moment in a country's legal history when a national law took shape, either judges or legislators or jurists were the dominant forces in that process.' The Times Higher Education Supplement