A Historical Introduction to the Law of Obligations

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To understand the nature of obligatio we should begin with the verb form, obligare , and see its etymology and meaning. Its core meaning, already by the time of Plautus, is to bind , tie up or fasten, with its root ligare derived from the Greek λυγόω, with the same sense. Its secondary, abstract meaning of putting a person under a duty , which is found by the end of the Republic, maintains its link with this concrete meaning of binding or tying. In addition, it could refer to the binding of a thing, as where its owner pledged it to another. It is from here that we get, at the latest by the time of Cicero, the noun obligatio . David Henderson is arrested at his home in East Riding of Yorkshire by Dorset Police. He is taken to Hull police station and interviewed but answers "no comment"

We are delighted to announce that Professor Helen Scott will join the Faculty of Law in October 2022 as the Regius Professor of Civil Law. The Regius Professorship of Civil Law was founded by Henry VIII in 1540 and was the University of Cambridge’s first Chair in Law. The Chair is currently held by Professor David Ibbetson, who will retire in September 2022; other recent holders of the Chair include Professor Peter Stein and Professor David Johnston. A source from Cardiff City FC said the club “welcomed the verdict” and hoped it would “provide some closure” to the families of Emiliano Sala and David Ibbotson. The source said: “We are pleased that individuals’ responsibilities have been well established in court and Cardiff City FC’s actions have been appropriate. A lot of the misdirected allegations towards the club and suggestions of wrongdoing can end at this point. Obligations arise either from contract or from wrongdoing or by some special right from various types of causes. Coaching empowers you to gain deeper insight into your challenges and opportunities, and achieve your personal and professional goals. As your coach, I ask you creative, intuitive questions and share recommendations for your consideration. This helps you clarify your own thinking and assists you in intuitively engaging your own knowledge, experience and skill sets to maximize your personal and professional potential. Good intuition comes from having good information and good personal wellness. Coaching is completely confidential.

Dr Sophie Turenne

Professor Okeoghene Odudu is University Senior Lecturer in Law and Co-Director of CELS. His expertise lie in EU and UK competition law. He has recently completed a major research project on the application of competition law to the National Health Service in England - funded by the British Academy - and he is engaged in a long-term project seeking to examine the competition law implications of the 'Open Public Services Agenda'. 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 .

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). An inquest into the death of Emiliano Sala is scheduled to take place on February 14 next year at Bournemouth Coroners' Court. 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.”David Ibbotson did not have a commercial pilot’s licence and the rating he needed to fly a single-piston engine had expired in November 2018.

Although the obligatio was at its core a relationship between two parties, as a noun it was reified so that it was seen as an asset in the hands of the beneficiary. In his Institutes, Gaius places obligationes in his list of incorporeal things, alongside inheritances, usufructs and servitudes ; something that is repeated by Justinian. An obligatio therefore had a duration; it could be said to be born and to be extinguished or brought to an end . It could endure or remain, or it could be perpetuated. If a transaction was undone so that there was restitutio in integrum, a former obligatio could be restored. When a novation occurred it could be said that the obligatio had been changed, and as a thing it could be sold or transferred. Indeed, so proprietary was the obligatio that both Ulpian and Julian say that it can be made the subject of a condictio ; where a promise had been made without a causa the promisor could bring a condictio to reclaim the obligatio itself, not the sum of money that had been promised. 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 .

The striker moved to France in 2010 having been signed by Bordeaux and made his first team debut two years later. He was loaned out to Championnat National side US Orleans for the 2012-13 season and was later loaned out to Chamois Niortais in Ligue 2 and Caen in Ligue 1. David Ibbetson has been at the forefront of legal historical scholarship for four decades. He began his legal historical studies at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, reading Law as an undergraduate and staying on for a doctorate on the development of assumpsit under John Baker. He moved to Oxford to take up a Fellowship at Magdalen College in 1980, where he spent the next twenty years developing research interests spanning English legal history, European legal history, the law of ancient Rome and pre-Roman legal systems. He returned to Cambridge in 2000 to take up the Regius Professorship of Civil Law, and to Corpus where he took a particularly central role in the mentoring of the graduate community. His work in fostering graduate communities made him an ideal fit for Clare Hall, where he was President between 2013 and 2020. More specifically it might flow from a delict , from the giving of a dowry , from a legacy or from a judgement . During his evidence, Mr Smith said he insisted a French mechanic should look over the plane. He added: “I cannot certify an aircraft without looking at it.” While he could not confirm the plane had been looked at, he said he was told by Mr Ibbotson the plane had been seen by a mechanic. A paper on English legal humanism may be, almost by definition, a paper without a subject. If legal humanism is taken in its continental sense described by Douglas Osler, as a concern with the establishment of the true texts of the Justinianic corpus and elsewhere, and their interpretation as such, using philological and historical methods, as part of the study of Antiquity, then we would hardly expect there to be very much in England, certainly not in connection with English law. Even if we take a broader approach to humanism, things are not much better. Anyone who takes the trouble to do a Google search on the phrase “English legal humanism” will, at the time this is being written, get hardly a single hit. While none of us would want to treat Google as a definitive index of the world's knowledge, the paucity of references does indicate that it is something of a non-topic. According to one work on humanism in Tudor England, the study of law, like the study of logic, Latin grammar and Aristotelianism, was transformed by the activity of humanist scholars; but the references are to France and Basel, not to England. So far as the modern literature goes, there is nothing there.