INTRODUCTION

When Frederick Henry Lawson's Negligence in the Civil Law first appeared in 1950, English-speaking reviewers were quick to register that this was an important moment. Lawson had become the first Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Oxford only two years earlier, and Owen Hood Phillips, writing in the Modern Law Review, evidently felt that a celebration was in order. ‘[W]e congratulate Professor Lawson’, he wrote, ‘on putting this admirable tool at the disposal of teachers and students, the University of Oxford on providing him with an appropriate chair, and the Clarendon Press on furnishing an excellent production at reasonable cost’. Other reviewers, while less effusive, were overwhelmingly positive in their assessments.

In praising the work for its value to teachers and students, Hood Phillips was echoing Lawson's own description, in the opening sentence of the Preface, as a

Lawson had set about this task by providing the complete text and translation of D.9.2 ad legem Aquiliam; texts and translations of other Roman legal texts; extensive extracts from a range of ‘foreign codes’ (stretching chronologically from 1794 to 1945, and geographically from the Soviet Union as far west as Mexico); and, finally, some Canadian statutory materials together with an article on the Saskatchewan Automobile Accident Insurance Acts. To guide students through this extraordinary range of materials, he had written a lengthy introduction (of nearly eighty pages), which combined systematic and historical analysis. It was, without doubt, a highly accomplished scholarly performance. But it was also, for reasons which I will now go on to explore, a peculiarly ambiguous and even enigmatic book, which was expressive of Lawson's own conflicted instincts about the importance of Roman law both generally and in his own professional identity, as well as being profoundly shaped by the historical conditions in which it was written. My aim is not to debunk, or to diminish Lawson's achievement; rather, it is to show how that achievement is more complex, and harder won, than we might previously have thought.