‘[O]ur whole constitutional law seems at times to be but an appendix to the law of real property.’1 At no time in English history was this aphorism truer than in the aftermath of 1066; indeed, it became uniquely so as a consequence of the kingdom’s conquest. England’s legal tradition was already distinctive prior to that point. The circumstances of the Conquest, and the rapid substitution of a new aristocracy of foreign settlers, rendered it doubly so. The importance of the Conquest and its implementation in the development of English law, and especially the law of real property, can scarcely be overstated.

George Garnett explores the roles of time and history in English Common Law, and how they gave the Common Law its political salience. He begins by picking apart F.W. Maitland’s celebrated contrast between the ‘logic of evidence’, deemed to be characteristic of historical understanding, and the ‘logic of authority’, deemed to be characteristic of legal understanding. Celebrated as this statement has been, Garnett contends that the almost – but crucially not quite – antithetical relationship has never been properly understood, and that it rests in part on Maitland’s misunderstanding of how legal development and continuity worked in the period before judicial precedent became central, in the late sixteenth century. The chapter is therefore concerned both with Maitland and with the peculiar problems encountered in tracing legal development and continuity in a system which was primarily customary rather than statutory. By extension, Garnett considers the implications for explaining the use of English legal history in political thinking, particularly in the seventeenth century. Emphasis is laid on Maitland’s distaste for Sir Edward Coke, then as now, the most influential Common Law jurist.

This chapter provides a deep dive into UK company law, assessing the common law before the changes to the Companies Act enacted in 2006. It finds that prior to 2006, the judiciary provided directors with a significant amount of discretion to make even profit-sacrificing actions if they benefited the company as a whole, widely reflecting the entity theory of companies. Corporate governance reviews, from the Cadbury Report onwards, did not reflect this common law approach. A detailed examination of the work of the Company Law Review Steering Group illustrates that the changes codified in s172 of the Companies Act 2006 actually entrenched a shareholder primacy approach to company law that previously was not dominant in English common law. This development could have negative impacts for the climate, although the relationship between s172 and the prior common law interpretation of directors’ duties remains unclear. Post-2006 cases are also assessed, and an overview of where climate liability could arise for directors under the 2006 Act is provided.