- published: 21 Sep 2015
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The law of obligations is one of the component private law elements of the civil system of law. It includes contract law, delict law, quasi-contract law, and quasi-delict law. The law of obligations seeks to organize and regulate the voluntary and semi-voluntary legal relations available between moral and natural persons with respect to
Despite the relatively distinct nature of these various sources of obligations, they are considered together under a law of obligations on the basis that all are instances where a debtor has a duty to execute a certain performance towards a creditor.
The word originally derives from the Latin "obligare" which comes from the root "lig" which suggests being bound, as one is to God for instance in "re-ligio". This term first appears in Plautus' play Truculentus at line 214.
Obligations did not originally form part of Roman Law, which mostly concerned issues of succession, property, and family relationships. It developed as a solution to a gap in the system, when one party committed a wrong against another party. these situations were originally governed by a basic customary law of revenge. This undesirable situation eventually developed into a system of liability where people were at first encouraged and then essentially forced to accept monetary compensation from the wrongdoer or their family instead of seeking vengeance. This signaled an important shift in the law away from vengeance and towards compensation. The state supported this effort by standardizing amounts for certain wrongs. Thus the earliest form of Obligation law derives out of what we would today call Delict.
Peter Birks QC, FBA (3 October 1941 – 6 July 2004) was the Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford from 1989 until his death. He also become a Fellow of the British Academy in 1989, and an honorary Queen's counsel in 1995. He was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is widely credited as having sparked academic enthusiasm for the English law of Restitution, and is often considered to have been one of the greatest English legal scholars of the 20th century.
He originally studied at Trinity College, Oxford and subsequently obtained a master of laws from University College London.
Birks was also the first general editor of English Private Law, a book which sought to summarise and rationalise the entire scope of English private law, in accordance with Birks' own passionate belief for order and charactersiation within a discipline (law) which he regarded as too eclectic and inconsistent. He also wrote An Introduction To The Law Of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment, and wrote some 142 contributions to legal reviews.