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A. R. Buck, The Making of Australian Property Law. Sydney, N. S.W.: Federation Press, 2006. 176 pp.
Students in first year law in English-speaking common law schools in Canada follow a fairly standard curriculum, heavily weighted in favour of private law subjects such as torts, contracts and property, with criminal law, constitutional law, and perhaps a methods, theories or skills course rounding out their required courses. Most students find the content to be as they expected in courses in torts, contracts, criminal and constitutional law. These areas of law, after all, provide the law-related stories that are an increasing part of national and even international news. But many students find first year property a puzzle. They expect the course to deal with protecting one's property from others; buying and selling land; creating and marketing residential, commercial and recreational developments; or raising money on the security of land. Instead, students are presented with ideas of property rights and obligations that developed in England in the five hundred years following the Norman Conquest. Grappling with such abstractions as freehold and leasehold estates, reversions and remainders, or determinable and defeasible interests, students have little time to ponder why rules that developed in a very different time and place continue to shape the possibilities for structuring their client's business and family opportunities in the twenty-first century.
In Australia, it seems, based on my quick survey of law programmes online, most students beginning a university law programme will study torts and contracts but not property law. In upper years, they will take courses that treat land law separately from other aspects of property law, using texts that assume that land law in Australia is "peculiarly Australian." Andrew Buck includes this quotation, taken from the first page of A. Bradbrook, S. MacCallum, and A. Moore, Australian Real Property Law, in the preface to his monograph, The Making of Australian Property Law. (p. vii) He refers to other authors as well who have paid careful attention to "distinctively Australian adaptations of the inherited English law of real property." (p. viii) The emphasis on change rather than continuity may stimulate student questions about how the law they study came to be. Buck's book provides some answers. By placing legal developments in their social...