The Manuscript

It is Birks' views on these four topics—obligations in general, contracts, delicts, and other causative events—as they were put on paper for the benefit of undergraduate students in Edinburgh in the early 1980s, which are presented to today's readers.

In one sense, these notes are complete. They read remarkably fluently, and indeed the fact that a copy was deposited at the time in the law library of his institution indicates that Birks expected them to be read by others. This made the work of the editor, coming many years later and with no opportunity to ask questions of the author, much easier than it could have been. Nonetheless they were never intended for publication as a book, and so significant work had to go into preparing the manuscript for that purpose. The choice was made to intervene as little as possible: these remain lecture notes, written in an oral and informal style. At the end of the day nothing can, or for that matter should, change this fact. And so caveat lector. What the editor has done is simply try to polish the manuscript in such a way as to make the reading experience of the reader more like that of a normal book and less like that of the scholar diving in archives. Typos and evident mistakes were corrected; style of citations harmonized; references provided in footnotes; and tables and index compiled. In spite of this, it remains evident that these are notes that were meant to be read aloud to students, not the polished sort of work that the author would have produced had he decided to turn these lectures into a book himself.^[9]

A difficult question that faces the editor of a text written by another is the extent to which he should mark out what is original and what is not.

INTRODUCTION XXVii citations of sources, round brackets were used to indicate alternative versions (for instance English and Latin), while square brackets were meant to signal Birks' own gloss on the original.

At the end of the book, the reader will find a list of questions followed by a translation of extracts from Gaius (and Justinian in the context of the â€?quasi categories', which do not feature in Gaius's Institutes). These were extracted from a series of eight hand-outs prepared by Birks for tutorials associated with these lectures. The snippets were included despite the availability of modern English translations,¹¹ both because some questions refer to specific passages in them and also because the way Birks chose to translate these is a matter of scholarly interest in and of itself.

Finally, while Latin permeates these lectures throughout, which ought not to be tampered with because no serious study of a legal system can do without attention being given to the language in which it expressed itself, Birks had anticipated the tragic collapse of classical studies in British schools over the last 30 years: everything in these lectures is either translated or explained. A smattering of Latin helps greatly to follow, and the reader with such knowledge will hugely benefit from Birks' engagement with the original; but the one who is not so equipped should not find it a hindrance.

Eric Descheemaeker Edinburgh 5 October 2013 Notes: (i) References to �Lenel' are to Otto Lenel, Das Edictum Perpe­tuum (3rd ed., Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1927); (ii) all translations in the lectures are believed to be Birks' own unless otherwise specified. ^[11]