A Historical Introduction to the Law of Obligations

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Prosecutor Mr Goudie said: “We do not seek to suggest that Mr Henderson did not know what he was doing or care about safety, you will see a lot of maintenance took place on the aircraft, but that he ignored certain requirements when it suited him and his business interests.” Professor John Bell QC, FBA, FRSA is Emeritus Professor of Law. His expertise lie in comparative law in Western Europe (especially legal reasoning, public law and the law of obligations). His current research focuses on public law in France and Germany. At 9.05pm, Mr Fencioglu received a phone call from Cardiff air traffic control and was told the N264DB flight “had been lost” around 14 miles off the coast of Guernsey.

Professor Kenneth Armstong is Professor of European Law. His research focuses on European Union law and, in particular, the constitutional and institutional dimensions of EU economic and social governance. He has given expert evidence to the House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee and the Scottish Parliament's European and External Relations Committee on the EU dimension of the referendum on Scottish Independence. David Henderson speaks to Maritime and Coastguard Agency having been made aware the plane has disappeared Professor David Ibbetson FBA is Regius Professor of Civil Law. As a legal historian he has particular expertise in comparative European legal history and co-edited with Professor John Bell the Comparative Studies in the Development of the Law of Torts in Europe (Cambridge University Press). Mr Goudie said: “You didn’t want people to speak to the press and for people to get the wrong idea but you said David Ibbotson caused the crash, you had no information at the time so you knew he was not a competent flier. Let us proceed to obligations. Their basic division is into two species: for every obligation arises either from contract or from delict.Moreover, it is only an intimate relationship, not an equivalence . The obligatio gives rise to the actio, the actio is grounded on the obligatio. There is, therefore, a separation in time between the two; the purpose of the actio is to obtain performance of the obligatio and thereby to dissolve it . This is an important aspect of the relationship between the two ideas. While the obligatio exists, as well as the legal relationship between the parties there is a social relationship of dominance and subordination . The inevitable period of time between the creation of the obligatio and its dissolution (whether it be by actio or by performance) marks the continuance of this social relationship . The obligatio might continue indefinitely, it might never be dissolved, thereby stretching the duration of the power relationship . It may even be the case that the debtor might sometimes be expected not to perform, since it might not be appropriate for the person in the subordinate position to determine when the relationship should end . The Centre for English Legal History is delighted to host a valedictory lecture by David Ibbetson FBA, Regius Professor of Civil Law. The definition, if we can call it that, has all the marks of having been lifted from a classical or immediately post-classical source , possibly from Papinian (to whom all but two of the Digest’s uses of vinculum in the sense of an abstract bond are attributed) … The latter is perhaps more likely; even leaving out stylistic considerations, it is easier to imagine Justinian’s compilers having turned to the Gaian text than to Papinian to find their “definition”. In any event, whatever its source, it has probably been decontextualised without much thought for its generality or its appropriateness to the sixth century rather than the second or third . If what was to follow was an analysis of the nature of obligationes, a definition of this sort would have been near disastrous, but as a preliminary to the discussion of the different causae it does no harm. It stresses the personal nature of contractual and delictual obligations and their associates, contrasting with the relationship between person and thing which characterised the law of property .

But despite Ms Keely’s request, Henderson continued to use Mr Ibbotson and on one occasion asked the pilot to fly Ms Keely’s sister without the owner's knowledge. The basic division of all obligations is into two genera: for they are either civil or praeto- rian. Civil are those which are constituted by statutes or at least recognised by the ius civile. Praetorian are those which the praetor has established out of his own authority, which are also called honorary. Conventionis nomen generale est, ut eleganter dicat Pedius nullum esse contractum, nullam obligationem, quae non habeat in se conventionem, sive re sive verbis fiat: nam et stipulatio, quae verbis fit, nisi habeat consensum, nulla est. Please note that this event is being moved from LG18 to the McCrum Lecture Theatre in Corpus Christi College (due to industrial action)* Henderson said: “Following a plane crash there is always a serious inquiry and I wanted to be prepared for that.” The verdict

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Professor Richard Fentiman is Professor of Private International Law with an expertise in international and European civil procedure. He has given evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on European Affairs on the European Commission's Green Paper on the reform of the Brussels I Regulation and has previously advised the European Commission on intellectual property and international private law. If the AAIB suggests there was a significant failure in the exhaust system which led to carbon monoxide poisoning, it did not occur in the initial flight. Lawyers today rather take it for granted that there is a branch of the law called the law of obligations , including at the very least contract and tort , and that there is something called an obligation, designating the situation where one person is legally constrained to do or abstain from doing something to another. But neither of these is obvious, and it is highly likely that both are the products of Roman jurisprudence. It is true that in his treatment of justice in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle linked together contract and wrongdoing, the voluntary and involuntary types of sunallagmata— transactions or interactions —that might generate a requirement of corrective justice, but it goes too far to identify Aristotle’s sunallagma with the Romans’ obligatio: the former is an interaction that gives rise to corrective justice, the latter the abstract consequence of such a transaction . As a noun, obligatio has none of the imbalance of the verb , for it can refer both to the act and to the state of obliging, from both the active and passive standpoint. That said, there is probably a slant towards the passive end: it makes perfect sense to speak of a person being obliged without specifying who it is that is doing or has done the obliging , whereas we cannot so easily speak of the active party to the obligation without saying or implying who it is that is being or has been obliged. Perhaps more to the point, though, the noun carries with it a greater sense of the relationship between two persons than does the verb. It is this that accounts for its function in the institutional structure of Roman law . Verbs precede abstract nouns. David Daube has shown that in many situations the Roman jurists never got as far as creating abstract nouns , using instead verbal forms, or that they clearly preferred verbal forms to nominal. Obligatio, however, is a frequent occurrence in the texts, hardly less frequent in the Digest than the various forms of the verb. We can say that the development of the noun presupposes a sophistication of thought about the institution , an ability to treat an active relationship as a thing, and that at least by the time of Labeo, the first jurist known to have used the noun, Roman law had taken that step.