Review of ‘Gifts: A Study in Comparative Law’

Iris J. Goodwin (associate professor of law, University of Tennessee) has written and published a book review of Gifts: A Study in Comparative Law, which was written by Richard Hyland (distinguished professor, Rutgers Law) and published in 2009.

The following is the first paragraph of the book review:

Richard Hyland has written a masterpiece of comparative law scholarship.  Gifts: A Study in Comparative Law (2009) is a work certain to become a landmark in the extraordinary interdisciplinary conversation about gift giving that has been building in Hyland’s crescendo throughout much of the preceding century.  Hyland begins the book with the admission that it took him twenty years to complete it.  In an era in which law review articles get shorter with each issue and the 800-word op-ed piece is the vehicle of choice for considered debate about major public issues, the idea of anyone devoting such a staggering amount of time to a single project is difficult to contemplate, notwithstanding the resulting two-inch-thick volume in 8-point type.  A mere cursory perusal of the book, however, reveals a massive work of such erudition that the length of time Hyland devoted to his endeavor seems neither surprising nor, indeed, unreasonable.  This work not only manages to do yeoman’s work for the practicing attorney–providing six chapters that survey and compare the essential aspects of the substantive law of gifts in three common law and five civil law jurisdictions–but is also likely to change the terms of future discussions about the gift among comparativists and other scholars in the humanities and social sciences.  

Iris J. Goodwin

, Book Review: Gifts: A Study in Comparative Law, 44 Real Prop., Trust & Estate L.J. 823 (2010).