ABSTRACT
The law of obligations, as Lord Diplock noted (Chapter 1 § 2(b)), is closely interwoven both with remedies and with causes of action and this interrelationship raises a number of questions. To what extent is the idea of a law of obligations actually determined by the remedies that a court is able to grant? And how do these remedies relate to causes of action? In turn, how do causes of action relate to specific legal categories within the law of obligations and how do these specific categories relate to the generic obligations category itself? These are questions that need to be discussed in more depth since they help locate the law of obligations within what might be called – or what civil lawyers call – an institutional structure.1 Moreover, they are questions that are of importance to legal analysis and legal reasoning. In fact, one could go further: the institutional structure is the key to an understanding of European legal thought in general in that it provides the link between what the Roman jurists called legal science (scientia juris) and what they understood as the art of deciding cases (ars judicandi).2 Given that English law is, to an extent, in the process of adopting the language of Roman law – and not just in respect of a law of obligations, as we shall see – it might be valuable to examine the common law tradition in the context of scientia iuris and the ars judicandi. What is it to be knowledgeable in the common law?
