The English law of obligations has developed over most of the last millennium without any major discontinuity. Through this period each generation has built on the law of its predecessors, manipulating it so as to avoid its more inconvenient consequences and adapting it piecemeal to social and economic changes. Sometimes fragments borrowed from other jurisdictions have been incorporated into the fabric of English law; from time to time ideas developed elsewhere have, at least temporarily, imposed a measure of structure on a common law otherwise messy and inherently resistant to any stable ordering. The book exposes the historical layers beneath the modern rules and principles of contract, tort, and unjust enrichment. Small-scale changes caused by lawyers successfully exploiting procedural advantages in their clients' interest are juxtaposed alongside changes caused by friction along the boundaries of these principal legal categories; fossilized remnants of old doctrines jostle with newer ideas in a state of half-consistent tension; loose-knit rules of equity developed in the Chancery infiltrate themselves into more tightly controlled common law structures. The result is a system shot through with inconsistencies and illogicalities, but with the resilience to adapt as necessary to Take account of shifting pressures and changing circumstances.

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The Common law's tort of negligence, like its equivalents elsewhere, grew up with a basic rule of causation: in order to be liable, the defendant must be proved to have caused harm to the victim. In a series of cases, brought to a head in Sienkiewicz v. Greif, 1 the courts have developed an exception to this rule to be applied in cases of ambiguous causation, i.e. when it cannot be shown which one of a number of competing factors was the true cause of the victim's harm. This exceptional rule, now apparently with several sub-forms, has operated in particular where the victim has suffered mesothelioma as a result of exposure to asbestos, a situation in which it is scientifically impossible to identify which fibre or fibres brought about the illness, though it cannot be limited to such cases. The facts of Sienkiewicz were relatively straightforward. Mrs. Enid Costello died of mesothelioma. She had been tortiously exposed to asbestos while working for the defendants; in addition there was a background exposure to asbestos in the atmosphere. The statistical evidence suggested that the background asbestos would lead to some 24 cases of mesothelioma per million persons, and that the exposure by the defendant had increased this by approximately 18%. In other words, accepting for the moment the statistical evidence, there was an 85% chance that Mrs Costello had died from a non-tortious cause. None the less, it was held that the consequence of the earlier line of cases was that her estate should recover in full from the defendants as if they were the sole cause. The result perhaps appears strange, but it is hard to see how the court could have reached a different decision on the state of the authorities; as Lady Hale suggests, it was a hard case rather than a difficult one. 2 The purpose of the present article is to examine the state of the law after the decision in Sienkiewicz, to trace how it reached this state, and to assess how satisfactory it is both in theoretical terms and in terms of the results to which it leads. * Lecturer in Law, King's College London.

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