Svantesson on the Law of Obligations

The book was first published by Pearson Education in 2007, and this is now the fourth edition. It is a comprehensive, up-to-date, and extensively researched resource for students engaging with an area of private law central to their education in the law and preparation for legal practice.
Dan has taken an innovative approach to the subject matter. Contract law and tort law are typically taught separately, siloed within law school curricula in a manner that is quite artificial and inconsistent with the way the law is in fact practiced, administered and enforced. By approaching the subject matter of the text via the ‘Law of Obligations’, Dan is able to showcase the many ways in which contract law and tort law intersect and overlap. The book is also innovative in its recurring theme: the ways in which the law seeks to balance the need to uphold party autonomy and the need to limit party autonomy due to various public policy concerns such as the protection of the weaker party or the need for contracts to be effective.
The structure of the textbook has been carefully and thoughtfully planned and is user friendly without oversimplifying the complex content. Each chapter begins with a ‘Rule’ representing a codification of the common law as it stands. This provides students with an accessible overview or ‘map’ of the relevant area of law before they are presented with the actual sources of the law, i.e. the relevant cases. The typical approach elsewhere is to move from a focus on the micro issues (principles extracted from cases) to the macro issues (a comprehensive picture). Dan’s book goes from macro issues to micro issues, thereby providing the reader with an immediate appreciation of how the relevant area of law operates and of how the concepts and principles identified from the cases interrelate.