Matthew Dyson is a Fellow in Law at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he specialises in the relationship between tort and crime. David Ibbetson is the Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Cambridge. He is also Co-Director of the Centre for English Legal History.

• 1. 'The hypostasis of prophecy': legal realism and legal history Charles Donahue, Jr; 2. Chancery, the Justices and the making of new writs in thirteenth-century England Paul Brand; 3. Copulative complexities: the exception of adultery in medieval dower actions Gwen Seabourne; 4. Arbitration and the legal profession in late medieval England Anthony Musson; 5. Privileges and their application in the main English central courts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Susanne Jenks; 6. Trusts litigation in chancery after the Statute of Uses: the first fifty years Neil Jones; 7. The assessment of contractual damages at common law in the late sixteenth century David Ibbetson; 8. The case of Joan Peterson: witchcraft, family conflict, legal invention, and constitutional theory Clive Holmes; 9. Criminal informations of the Attorneys-General in the King's Bench from Egerton to North Henry Mares; 10. Lawyers, merchants, and the law of contract in the long eighteenth century Warren Swain; 11. Creditors and the Feme Covert James Oldham; 12. Legal process as reported in correspondence John Baker; 13. Legal development in Victorian felony trials Phil Handler; 14. Cutting the Gordian Knot? Arbitration and company insolvency in the 1870s Michael Lobban; 15. 'Forty years on': the British Legal History Conference, 1972–2011 Patrick Polden.

'… this book is a worthy addition to what is arguably the leading legal history publication series.' Jonathan A. Bush, Law and History Review