This book had its origins in a remarkable seminar given by Stephan Kuttner and Peter Landau more than 40 years ago. At that time those of us in law schools were enamored of what we called ‘policy’, looking at legal doctrine from the point of view of the social objectives it was designed to achieve, or could be used to achieve. As we read Alexander III's decisions on the topic of the formation of marriage in the seminar, it struck me that the policy of those decisions was to enhance the power and control of the couple over their choice of marriage partners at the expense of others (parents, lords, etc.) who might seek to dictate that choice. I wanted to study how Alexander's decisions were used in actual cases in order to determine whether they had had this effect.

While I have not abandoned the notion that the classical canon law could have been used to enhance the freedom of a marrying couple and that it was, in some sense, designed to achieve this effect, I look back now on those initial thoughts as somewhat naïve. My understanding, and, I think, that of those who study law generally, of what goes into making an important legal change has deepened, but it has also become more incoherent. Rare is the important legal change that can be explained simply on the basis of ‘policy considerations’, as we understood them in the mid-1960s, and Alexander's decisions are not among those that can.