The choice of an introductory book in the study of law is a difficult one and tutors’ advice varies between the over-practical, with guidebooks on how to pass professional examinations, to the over-abstract, with philosophical discourses on the nature of law. This book, adopting a comparative and historical approach and written by the Regius Professor of Civil Law of Cambridge University, fills the middle ground. It is expressly designed “to give students at an early stage in their course a bird’s eye view of the main institutions found in most developed legal systems”. To this end it divides the subject into two parts, looking first at the “external” institutions, forms of dispute settlement and law-finding, and second at the substantive law. It traces the law’s development