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The comparative law of property is a budding, but still extremely underdeveloped, field of study; yet its importance is self-evident in an age of Europeanisation of law and legal scholarship. Bringing together contributions of scholars from the civilian tradition (France, Germany, Italy), the common-law world (England) and mixed legal systems (Quebec, Scotland, South Africa), The Consequences of Possession examines from a historical and comparative perspective the consequences which the law derives from the recognition of a possessory relationship between a person and a thing. Excluding rights which require more than possession to be triggered (such as prescriptive acquisition or transfer of title by delivery), it focuses on the protection of possession across the divide between the two great western legal traditions.

By comparison with other areas of private law, the law of succession has been neglected by modern scholars. This book contributes to its rehabilitation by examining key issues in succession law from a variety of perspectives: national, historical and comparative. In particular it seeks to extend the techniques of legal comparison into an area of law where hitherto they have been little used. The jurisdictions most prominently featured are the mixed jurisdictions of Scotland and South Africa, but there are frequent comparative references, and special attention is given to the Netherlands as the country that has most recently re-written its succession law. The authors of the individual chapters are drawn from Scotland, South Africa, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. Among the topics covered are freedom of testation, testamentary conditions and public policy, forfeiture clauses and events, revocation of wills by changed circumstances, revocation of mutual wills, fideicommissary substitutions and succession agreements.

Returning to a theme featured in some of the earlier volumes in the Edinburgh Studies in Law series, this volume offers an in-depth study of ‘mixed jurisdictions’ — legal systems that combine elements of the Anglo-American Common Law and the European Civil Law traditions. This book compares key areas of private law in Scotland and Louisiana. In thirteen chapters, written by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, it explores not only legal rules but also the reasons for the rules, discussing legal history, social and cultural factors, and the law in practice, in order to account for patterns of similarity and difference. Contributions are drawn from the Law Schools of Tulane University, Louisiana State University, Loyola University New Orleans, the American University Washington DC, and the Universities of Aberdeen, Strathclyde, and Edinburgh.

This book explores how the private law concepts of trust and patrimony interact in various jurisdictions, with a view to advancing the understanding of the trust as a fundamental legal concept. It comprises new and previously published papers written by distinguished comparative law scholars. Focusing on the private law of England, Scotland, France, Quebec and the Netherlands, this book investigates whether the common law trust could be understood as a civil law patrimony by appropriation, and whether civil law and mixed traditions could create local versions of the common law trust using patrimony as the main conceptual building block.