ABSTRACT
The development of law within a nation-state is usually examined from a nationalist perspective through an examination of the internal forces that bring about change within a legal system. This chapter is concerned with how legal rules move from one jurisdiction to another by examining how certain legal “rules” moved from Louisiana and America to England. Judah P. Benjamin’s role as an agent of legal change was itself an accident for fate brought him to London in 1865. Benjamin’s working knowledge of a civil law system enabled him to develop a more sophisticated analysis of the applicability of civilian conceptions to the common law. A practical problem which bedeviled English law was the contract formed by correspondence. Benjamin set about to resolve the difficulty, for “the cases that arise in attempts to contract by correspondence present at times very singular complexity.” Benjamin had a profound and decisive influence in shaping the doctrine of mistake in English contract law.
