The book’s title is drawn from a late nineteenth century case—which is also the focus of the second chapter.Four men were shipwrecked in the mid-Atlantic. After over three weeks at sea with little food or water, the captain killed the cabin-boy who was the closest to dying. The three managed to survive by eating him and drinking his blood. When they were rescued, the three survivors told the authorities what they had done. Thinking that they had acted properly and in line with the law and lore of the sea, they had even brought the remains of their half-eaten colleague back to England for a decent burial. The authorities thought otherwise and two of them were charged with murder.

In the legal shenanigans and convolutions that followed, the judges grappled with what the requirements were for murder, particularly whether there was a defense of “necessity.” After many twists and turns, the men were convicted, but their punishment was commuted after wide public protest to six months in prison. The case still forms the basis of the common law and still challenges lawyers, old and new, to reflect on the appropriate basis for criminal conviction and punishment.

This case is typical of the common law’s development. A discrete incident—buying a drink with a foreign object in it, chasing a fox, or couriering a broken machine part—gives rise to a legal precedent that becomes one of the long-term building blocks of modern law. And other more portentous happenings—challenging segregated schooling, fighting religious persecution, and defending suspects’ rights—have set the law on courses that still shape contemporary thinking both in and outside law today.The book’s ambition is not to “unmask” or “debunk” the law or the role of lawyers and judges.From a democratic viewpoint, the demonstration that the common law is a thoroughly socialized and political enterprise can be as liberating as it is unsettling. By showing the common law as the living, breathing and down-the-street experience that it really is, it might become possible to grasp that the common law is nothing more (and nothing less) than what we make it. It has no special magic and lawyers have no special insight into the human condition. The common law is no better or worse than the lawyers, judges and commentators who comprise its dramatis personae.

The common law is simply another official location at which officials struggle to forge workable solutions to demanding controversies of private and public significance. The common law is a showcase or a shambles, depending on your point of view. It is what it is by virtue of the talents of those lawyers who work with it, the values of those judges who shape it, and the interests of those litigants who must rely upon it. And it will change in the same way.Whether societies should persist with such a process is not a question for technical experts, but one for political choice. If the common law is to continue in its privileged role, it will work best if it is stripped of its priestly trappings and viewed as the pragmatic, public and corrigible practice that it is.

And, by the way: is eating people wrong? Well, it is not the eating that is the problem. (That should be a matter of personal taste and food regulation more than anything else.) But killing people, that is the real problem.