Professor Martyn Rady Inaugural Lecture

Misleading cases in the customary law: the pertinacious litigant and Central Europe.

Historians have tended to regard customary law as either an unwritten text communicating fixed principles or else as a less sophisticated variety of the Common Law. A number of its principles were inadvertently satirized by A. P. Herbert through the interventions of his pertinacious litigant, Alfred Haddock. Customary legal systems are, however, readily explicable as a means of obtaining equitable solutions that comport with a popular understanding of the law’s content. In the modern period, customary law became one of the markers of Central Europe’s supposed backwardness and, paradoxically, also a symbol of national prestige and uniqueness.