late nineteenth century treatise writers, Frederick Pollock had no practice to speak of: he is only twice recorded as appearing in court.46 Much of his early career was spent as an independent legal scholar, qualified, but without a practice.He did not get a university chair until 1882, when he was already 37. These later treatise writers thought harder about how law should be made systematic and coherent; and sought more deeply than their predecessors to engage with what principles underlay it. Many of these authors, who had come of age in the mid-century, when interest in Roman law and continental legal thought was reviving in English legal education,47 sought to draw lessons from the civilian tradition. Nonetheless, their engagement with this theory remained limited. Even men like Pollock and Anson aimed primarily to present the case law developed in the courtroom in the most clear and comprehensible way for the student of the law. These authors did not write any theoretical work on contract or tort. Pollock certainly had his own strong views on how the law should develop - notably the law of tort, a topic on which he wrote the first principled treatise in England - yet he did not devote much time in his texts to fleshing out the theory. Rather, his key textbooks continued to be reissued in new editions: ten editions of the work on contract before his death in1936; and thirteen editions of his work on tort.The most ‘principled’ treatise writers at the end of our period remained highly deferential to the judiciary. Pollock felt that those American writers who took a ‘continental’ approach erred in this respect:“Decided cases are treated by them not as settling questions but as offering new problems for criticism.”48 Pollock’s other major role in life was as editor both of the official law reports, and of the Law Quarterly Review, in which he would produce a succession of case notes on recent decisions.Pollock’s role was perhaps one of trying to encourage the judges to be more principled, and to nudge them to a better development of the common law. But he saw that job as them i cha e l lob ban 147 46 N. Duxbury, Frederick Pollock and the English Juristic Tradition (Oxford, 2004), p. 29. 47 See esp. M. Graziadei, ‘Changing Images of the Law in XIX century English LegalThought (the Continental Impulse)’, in M.Reimann,The Reception of Continental Ideas in the Common LawWorld 1820-1920 (Berlin, 1993), pp. 115-63. 48 Pollock, ‘The Methods of Jurisprudence,’ in his Oxford Lectures and Other Discourses (London, 1890), at p. 33. In his view, their ‘continental’ approach took the form of seeing “the common law itself as an ideal system to be worked out with great freedom of speculation and comparatively little regard to positive authority.”
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