Not Doing is no Trespass
This article will tell some elementary stories about the history of contract and tort. Its purpose is primarily pedagogic: although the stories are largely old, they are not very clearly explained in the books, and in particular they are done something less than justice in the standard work, Mr. Fifoot's invaluable History and Sources of the Common Law. Since the present aim is to explain what the stories are, rather than to prove that they are true, their telling will be as little encumbered as possible with old cases and their technicalities. A secondary purpose is to set the stories together, and show how far they turn out to be the same story. It is doubtful whether even Ames, who first stated the most important of them, fully realised how far the point was the same in each; and since in one guise or another it is the point of much legal history it deserves more emphasis than it has had. Finally, since Professor Plucknett freed us from the sterile delusion that case was somehow “like” trespass, there has grown up a new background of ideas in which the old stories must be set afresh.