Bernard Rudden

Bernard Rudden, emeritus professor of comparative law at Oxford, is the author of The New River: A Legal History and The Law of Property.

Londoners have been drinking the New River for almost four hundred years. The aqueduct begins at Chadwell Spring, near Ware in Hertfordshire, and is soon joined by a cut from the River Lea. It winds south for some twenty miles and, for most of its history, ended in Islington, a few hundred yards south of the Angel. Both Hollar and Canaletto left elegant depictions of its Round Pond, from...

An often cited and much admired article by Charles Reich that appeared in the Yale Law Journal for 1964 tells us that ‘property performs the function of maintaining independence, dignity and pluralism by creating zones within which the majority has to yield. Whim, caprice, irrationality and antisocial activities are given the protection of law; the owner may do what all or most of his...

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