ln his 1995 Maccabaean Lecture to the British Academy, Professor Peter Stein described the long intellectual struggle to achieve a systematic understanding and exposition of the civil law.' He was chiefly concerned with the early modern attempts to improve on the scheme of Justinian's Institutes, and by civil law he meant the Rornan-based law of the continental jurisdictions and of others further afield to which that law has migrated. He did not consider in any detail the same story as it has been working itself out in the Anglo-American common law. And just as well perhaps. For in the common law that evolutionary process has faltered. Piecemeal legislation has combined with educational practice indifferent to legal taxonomy to return the common law to the disorderly heap on which the jurists of the earlier twentieth century must have hoped that they had begun to impose some order. The law library has vastly enlarged. Nobody would wish to deny the level of rationality within the topics which constitute the specialities of particular authors. ln much the same way in former times the law achieved a detailed, if sometimes inelegant, coherence within each package created by the forms of action. But the overview was largely neglected then, and more recently it has been, if anything, more neglected still. Yet the infernal rationality of individual units can itself save the whole from incoherence and contradiction.