Understanding legal phenomena requires analysis on at least three levels. First, there is the doctrinal level. In any legal system law is given expression in particular ways, and lawyers and those concerned with law employ certain methods to interpret and apply it. A doctrinal understanding is directed at these ways and methods. Secondly, legal phenomena can be understood at the theoretical level. Traditionally, this has been the province of jurisprudence, although in recent times philosophy and the social sciences have been responsible for a number of theoretical insights on law. Thirdly, legal phenomena can be placed in their commercial, social and economic context. The focus here is on what actually happens in practice, from the centrality of documentation in banking transactions to such general issues as explaining any discrepancies between the law in the books and the law in action.

The very term banking law indicates that our subject area is defined by reference to a fairly readily identifiable institution, banking. (Other areas of legal study are defined by concept, as with torts or contract; behaviour, as with criminal law and administrative law; or related to institutions in a much looser sense than banking law, as with constitutional law, property law and trusts.) However, this does not make the task of drawing the boundaries of banking law straightforward. In the preface to the first edition of his The Law of Banking, Hart spoke of a “wide field of law”—“All that can fairly be considered to have a special bearing upon bankers and their business is within the scope of the work”.1 The book covered banks as institutions, the banker-customer relationship, cheques, commercial finance, securities (including guarantees) and the stock exchange. In the last edition of The Law of Banking prepared by Paget himself, the author noted the increasing difficulty of writing of banking law as a distinct subject, since the activities of banks “are now so various and on such a scale that many questions arise involving general