ABSTRACT
To a lay person it may seem surprising that ‘lawyers’ do not claim to be expert in all areas of law. Rather, lawyers tend to specialise in particular areas of law in the same way that many medical practitioners develop expertise in different parts of the body. What this collection of essays has demonstrated, perhaps, is that this compartmentalisation of lawyers’ expertise, whether as academics, judges or practitioners, causes central concepts like property and obligations to be developed very differently in different areas of law. The manner in which a trusts lawyer would approach the question of rights in the home, typically by reference to the parties’ monetary contribution to the purchase price, 1 may differ greatly from a family lawyer’s approach to similar questions, 2 which may differ from a social security tribunal’s approach, 3 and so forth.
