Leading Cases in the Common Law

• Introduction ; The Study of Cases ; Politics and Law in Elizabethan England: Shelley's Case ; The Timeless Principles of Common Law: Keeble V. Hickeringill (1707) ; Legal Science and Legal Absurdity: Jee v. Audley ; The Beauty of Obscurity Raffles v. Wickelhaus and Busch ; Victorian Judges and the Problems of Social Cost: Tipping v. St Helen's Smelting Company (1865) ; Bursting Reservoirs and Victorian Tort Law: Rylands and Horrocks v. Fletcher (1868) ; The Ideal of the Rule of Law: Regina v. Keyn (1876) ; Quackery and Contract Law: Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Company (1893)

engaging and profoundly subversive book...If there is a more painstaking and ingenious researcher of local knowledge, a shrewder and more avid excavator of miscellanies, than Brian Simpson, I have never run across him: Simpson seems to have dug up pretty nearly everything that seems even remotely relevant to understanding his cases, and a great deal more besides. Indeed, so overwhelming is the mass of contextual detail that the reader is rescued from psychic inundation only by the inherent fascination of much of the background and Simpson's seductive charm as a storyteller. This is a very funny book.