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Patrick Atiyah, who has died aged 87, was Professor of English Law at Oxford from 1977 to 1988 and one of the most important legal scholars of his generation in the common-law world.
A younger brother of the mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah, Patrick Atiyah was known to generations of law students for his classic Introduction to the Law of Contract, first published in 1961 and now in its sixth edition, an authoritative exposition which, unusually for a legal textbook, adopted a critical and argumentative approach, engaging readers in debates about the meaning and value of the law and opening up new ways of thinking about the law of obligations.
Atiyah was a founder member of the so-called “law-in-context” movement, which aims to broaden the study of law by examining it critically in its social, political and economic context. In 1970 he was the author of Accidents, Compensation and the Law, the first book in an eponymous series of studies published by Cambridge University Press.
This dealt with the law of tort, of which Atiyah was a prominent advocate for change. Tort governs the implicit civil responsibilities that people have to one another - as opposed...