Bracton’s treatise was followed centuries later by those of Blackstone, Coke and other legal luminaries whose early works laid a general foundation upon which were built the specialised edifices of law we know today. Building upon that general foundation in the nineteenth century were specialised legal treatises that addressed fields of law evolving to meet the developing demands of modern industry.2

One such specialised nineteenth century treatise was Hudson’s Building and Engineering Contracts (1891), among the earliest and then surely the most comprehensive to address the field that we know today as “construction law”—the over-arching field of jurisprudence encompassing the law governing the rights and obligations of participants engaged in the building and construction process—employers, contractors, subcontractors, sureties, architects, engineers, material and equipment suppliers, code officials, insurers, and others—and the conditions under which they worked. “Construction law” has derived much of its uniqueness from industry experience, customs and perceived foreseeable risks, which in turn have shaped evolving principles of common law and statutory law applicable to the built environment. The common law’s evolution through experience was articulated by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, the eminent American Supreme Court jurist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thus: