Before the 20th century, most rules of international law were in the form of customary international law. Since then, the increased complexity of international relations and rapid international development have led to a substantial growth in the number and diversity of treaties. Article 38(1)(a) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (‘ICJ Statute’) recognises treaties as a (material) source of international law by referring to ‘international conventions, whether general or particular, establishing rules expressly recognized by the contesting states’. Treaties now regulate trade, communications, environmental protection, military cooperation and defence, and human rights, to name but a few of the myriad topics. International environmental law, for example, is almost entirely governed by treaties, and international trade, investment and communications ‘are unimaginable without treaties’. The main rules in the law of treaties are contained in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (‘VCLT’), which governs treaty relations between states and is the focus of this chapter.

Speech is normally used for verbal interaction between at least two persons, called interlocutors. Researchers have measured rate of information transfer by speech across languages and have found a relatively constant value across languages. Spoken language is very different from written language in a number of important ways. Speech is perceived by hearers based primarily on the acoustic information contained in the speech signal, but modified by a number of factors, including top--down processing. Perception is made more complex by factors such as the necessity of segmenting and variance in the signal caused by individual differences and conditions of the speech environment. Speaker normalization is required by the hearer. The ear and hearing mechanism play an important role in speech perception. Rapid pressure variation of sound is converted to fluctuations in the viscous fluids of the inner ear or cochlea. This conversion occurs through the middle ear in which the principle of the lever, and the principle of collecting energy over a large area and concentrating it, play roles.

Speech consists of sound waves that propagate in the air from talker to hearer. Sound waves consist of rapidly changing pressure within the medium, normally air in the instance of speech. If the variations of pressure are regular, then the sound has a tonal quality. Most, but not all, speech sounds have this tonal quality. Sound amplitude relates to the amount of energy and is perceived as loudness. The speed of pressure variation is called frequency and is perceived as pitch. Individual sound waves combine additively, creating complex sound waves. Acoustic analysis of speech creates spectrograms, giving a visual representation of the original sound. In certain conditions, such as the interior of the vocal tract, sound reverberates in a self-additive way, giving rise to cavity resonance. The frequencies of this resonance can be modified by adjustments in the position of the speech articulators, creating different speech sounds, which occurs through the source--filter theory.

This short epilogue completes our story by giving a glimpse into what happened next. It surveys in outline some of the major developments affecting the common law after the Civil War. We return to the space ship, Freedonia and to our narrator the Man of Law as he reflects on the stories he has told and tells one last tale: of murder and trial by battle ... in nineteenth-century England.

Our penultimate chapter explores the extent to which the Tudor period saw a legal renaissance. It examines developments in the common law courts but also explores the development of new conciliar courts outside the common law, most notably star chamber and the court of equity, which were to prove influential. It also examines the further rise in the use and importance of statute law in this period, demonstrating that the Reformation statutes that split England from the Roman Catholic Church underscored the power of Parliamentary statute. Attention is also given to some developments in the common law courts during this period concerning the law of obligations (the development of the principle of consideration in contract law), property law (the development of the writ of ejectment that replaced the older land law writs and the origins of the law of trusts) and criminal law (the development of the distinction between murder and manslaughter).

This book seeks to tell you what you are unlikely to be told as part of your law course. It provides the ‘back stories’ of some of the main topics that you are likely to study during your degree. This book is designed to give you a head start and should mean that your study of the current law makes more sense. The chapters that follow tell some of the main stories of the history of English law. They focus on stories told about the origins of the common law, tracing elements of the development of English law from around the time of the Norman Conquest to the outbreak of Civil War in the Stuart period. This introductory chapter provides a run-through of some of the main arguments. It falls into three parts. The first part explains what the common law is and provides an introduction to Maitland, our chosen tour guide. The second part identifies seven reasons why a historical approach to law is needed. The third part of the chapter provides a brief guide to further reading and an outline of the chapters that follow, which will explore some of the stories of the common law.

This short afterword explores the development of the book and the meaning of its title. It provides the author’s reflections on the text and his acknowledgements.

This short prologue provides an introduction to the main features of the English law for those readers who are new to the study of law. It introduces our narrator, the Man of Law, as he explains some of the curious features of the common law.

This final chapter examines the early Stuart period in the years leading to the Civil War. This ending point, though necessarily arbitrary, has been chosen because of the entwinement between centralised royal power and the origins of the common law described in previous chapters means that it can be said that the common law had reached a level of maturity when it was able to survive for an extended period of time without a monarch. The Civil War further provides an appropriate conclusion to our survey given that it was the culmination of the conflicts between the king and his advisers, which date back centuries to Magna Carta and beyond. The chapter explores this final time period by exploring the work, behaviour and legacy of Sir Edward Coke, who has been likened to the Shakespeare of the law, and who is often seen as the bridge between the medieval and the modern laws.

Although we will be taking Maitland as our main tour guide, this chapter will explore the various storytellers by introducing the various perspectives. It will begin by distinguishing between what may be referred to as the intellectual history tradition in legal history, which explores the development of legal ideas within legal sources, and the social history tradition, which explores legal changes within their social context. It will demonstrate that both approaches complement one another and that, although Maitland is often regarded as a significant figure in the intellectual history tradition, some of his work can also be situated in the social history tradition. Further, it will be shown that Maitland’s work often demonstrated what may be styled a radical approach to legal history. The chapter will conclude by examining a number of radical perspectives that have been taken to the interaction between law and history, namely critical legal history, feminist legal history, critical race theory and my own call for a subversive legal history. These approaches are presented so that you can critique and apply insights from these perspectives as we re-tell and question the conventional stories of the genesis of the common law.

This chapter completes our examination of the long Plantagenet period, which culminated in the bloody War of the Roses. However, as the chapter title makes plain, the focus is on the impact that the deadly plague of this period had upon law and order. The chapter explores the different interpretations made of the importance of the Black Death and surveys developments of this period such as the origins of what we would today call employment law, significant increases in the effectiveness of the administration of justice chiefly through increased powers for justices of the peace and important developments in both law of obligations (exploring how actions on the case developed from the writ of trespass and how it further developed into the action on the case for assumpsit) and the criminal law (focusing on treason and murder).