title: A History of Private Law in Europe: with particular reference to Germany
author:  Franz Wieacker 
description: Tony Weir is a brilliant translator of legal German, and here he has surpassed himself. For this we should be all the more grateful, because Franz Wieacker was one of the great German scholars of the postwar world. His range and depth of learning are unsurpassed..This, in my opinion, is the best general book on European legal history in any language. I say "general" because of the breadth of the enterprise, but it is nonetheless detailed, original, and insightful...it is a book that all legal historians will need to keep close at hand for constant reference...We owe a great debt to Weir for making this work accessible to an English-reading public.'<br /><br />Oxford University Press and Tony Weir, the translator of the present edition, deserve to be applauded for providing this translation...Tony Weir's translation reads like a work that was originally written in English, so convincing is it...as one might expect from a work bearing the Clarendon Press imprint, the editing is of high quality and accuracy. There is a useful general index and separate index of persons. In these days of European Union, no legal historian or European private lawyer can afford to be without a copy of this book.'<br /><br />`Wieacker's Privatrechtsgeschichte der Neuzeit has long been a classic, and its appearance in English is a major event. Every serious law library outside German-speaking Europe will purchase a copy...The legal world was already deeply indebted to Weir: this book much increases those obligations, in rendering accessible Wieacker's masterpiece. It is to be hoped that more treasures of German scholarship will also one day be translated by Weir himself or others inspired by him.' International and Comparative Law Quarterly
zlib_text: Socialism and Legal History
  
  This book focuses on the way in which legal historians and legal scientists
  used the past to legitimize, challenge and explain the socialist legal orders,
  which were backed by dictatorial governments.
  
  The volume studies legal historians and legal histories written in Eastern
  European countries during the socialist era after the Second World War. The
  book investigates whether there was a unified form of socialist legal
  historiography and, if so, what can be said of its common features. The
  individual chapters of this volume concentrate on the regimes that are
  situated between the Russian, and later Soviet, legal culture and the area
  covered by the German Civil Code. Hence, the geographical focus of the book is
  on East Germany, Russia, the Baltic states, Poland, and Hungary. The approach
  is transnational, focusing on the interaction and intertwinement of the then
  hegemonic communist ideology and the ideas of law and justice as they appeared
  in the writings o