Reference for History

Using statutes and administrative rulings, judicial decisions, and descriptions of legislatures, agencies, and courts, the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History offers a clear background on geographically distinctive laws, their origins, and their consequences throughout world history.

Legal history has expanded beyond traditional parochial boundaries to become increasingly international and comparative in scope and orientation. Drawing on scholarship from around the world, and representing a variety of methodological approaches, areas of expertise, and research agendas, this timely compendium takes stock of legal history and methodology and reflects on the various modes of the historical analysis of law, past, present, and future.

European law, including both civil law and common law, has gone through several major phases of expansion in the world.