In my job of teaching law students such things as sales, carriage, secured transactions, set off, rules of jurisdiction and recognition of foreign court judgments, what I teach my students is, I hope, of practical relevance to what (commercial) practitioners would hope future lawyers need to know. Ernie Weinrib's The Idea of Private Law doesn't come up much when teaching about charterparties.

However, when writing for and talking to an audience of academics it is unsurprising if the perspective taken is a more theoretical one.(Not all of what I write at least is aimed at that audience). Whilst much of such work usually, I'd accept, justifiably has the lifespan of a mayfly, when it is really well dones (as Birks An Introduction to the Law of Restitution was) it can be enormously influential on law in practice, albeit sometimes indirectly. In this collection I'd single out Stephen Perry's piece as one which, if reflected upon by, say, a judge in a controversial negligence claim, has the potential to prevent serious errors from being made.