Introduction: Putting the Legal Treatise in its Place

In 1976, while working on the first volume of The Transformation of American Law, Morton Horwitz noted that treatises were "the most neglected and really important sources of American legal history." Little has changed since then: treatises are still neglected, they are still really important, and not only in American legal history, but in common law history as a whole. This book aims to give legal treatises their due by undertaking an international and comparative analysis of the significance of the common law treatise in modern legal history and historiography