“What is distinctive about the law of equity? In his lectures on equity, Maitland argued that the answer to this question is ‘nothing’. As the editors of Philosophical Foundations of Equity note in their introduction, Maitland’s view was that equity is just a body of judge-made law that originated in a particular court, and its distinctiveness was therefore abolished by statute in the 19th century. If Maitland was right, equity describes a body of law united only by historical circumstance; accordingly, any attempt to elucidate its philosophical foundations would be entirely misguided. Many of the contributions to this collection of essays are united in arguing that Maitland was wrong, that there is something conceptually, not merely contingently, distinctive about the law of equity, and that equity therefore has a distinctive philosophical foundation that might be uncovered and understood …” (more)
Jennifer Nadler, ‘What is Distinctive about the Law of Equity?’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqaa065. Published: 22 January 2021.
First posted 2021-01-25 07:51:13
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