ABSTRACT

It has been said that certainty is the principal virtue of every legal system (Oakley, 1997). Whether or not that is true, chaos and complexity are the common characteristics of every problem that confronts a legal system. That is the tension at the centre of this book. While the law seeks to impose certainty, litigants bring only confusion. As Aristotle observed, the law can only create general rules such that there will always be circumstances in which those general rules will produce unfair results. A legal system therefore needs a mechanism to allow it to deal with those unexpected situations and to ensure fair outcomes. Equity is the way in which English private law does this.