Purchasers, was first published in 1805, when he was twenty four years old. Sudgen continued himself to issue revised editions of this work until 1862. His second, a treatise onPowers appeared in1808, and continued to attract his attention until 1861.42 Another example might be Colin Blackburn, who became judge of the Queen’s Bench in 1859, where he remained until his promotion to the House of Lords in1876. While an obscure practitioner, he wrote a treatise on the law of Sale in 1845 at the age of 31. His work was more intellectual than most, for he displayed a good knowledge of Roman law and of Pothier in it. Nonetheless, it did not help him immediately to attain great professional recognition, for he spent much of the decade until his promotion to the bench as a law reporter. Not only did Blackburn write no more treatises, but he left it to another editor to produce a second edition of his text in 1885.43 If works published in the first half of the century were largely digests of case law, after the 1850s, we find more principled works on offer. In the field of contract law, the treatises by S. M. Leake (written in1867), Frederick Pollock (written in 1876) and William Anson (written in 1879) are generally regarded as the first principled treatises.44 Pollock’s treatise on tort, published in1887, is generally seen as the first systematic treatment of that subject.Unlike the writers in the early nineteenth century who saw legal writing as a way of gaining a career at the bar, these men had been condemned to failure in practice.As a young lawyer, Leake had practiced and co-wrote an influential manual of pleading. But by 1867, when he was over 40, he had become increasingly deaf, and now turned to legal exposition.45 Anson also had an early career at the bar, but his name was made at Oxford University, where he becameVinerian Reader in 1874, and was active in the reform of that university’s legal education.His work was specifically aimed at law students, rather than practitioners. Perhaps the most prominent of the re cht swi s s e n scha f t al s j ur i st i sch e dok t r i n 146 42 E.B. Sugden, A Practical Treatise on the Law of Vendors and Purchasers of Estates (London 1805); A Practical Treatise of Powers (London, 1808). 43 C. Blackburn, A Treatise on the Effect of the Contract of Sale, 2d ed by J.C. Graham, (London, 1885). 44 S. M. Leake, The Elements of the Law of Contracts (London, 1867); F. Pollock, Principles of Contract at Law and Equity (London, 1876);W.R.Anson, Principles of the English Law of Contract (Oxford, 1879). 45 E. Bullen and S. M. Leake, Precedents of Pleading in Actions in the Superior Courts of Common Law(London, 1860). Besides his work on contract, he also wrote An Elementary Digest of the Law of Property in Land (London, 1874).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=