Cross – författare

The previous three editions of this book have established it as the most comprehensive account of precedent in English law for students, teachers and practitioners alike. The aim of the book is to present a basic guide to the current doctrine of precedent in England, set in the wider context of the jurisprudential problems which any treatment of the topic involves. Such problems include the nature of the ratio decidendi of a precedent and of its binding force, the significance of precedents alongside other sources of law, their role in legal reasoning, and the account which must be taken of them by any general theory of law. In examining these matters, the late Sir Rupert Cross expounded a fairly traditional practitioners' view, and this approach has been preserved in the fourth edition, although references are included to competing answers, taking into account developments in the literature since the third edition. Considerable re-writing has been undertaken to update case-law and take account of the possible implications for the doctrine of precedent of the impact of European community law, making it an indespensable work of reference for readers interested in the past history, present state and future developments of the English rules of precedent. Dr. J.W. Harris is a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. The late Sir Rupert Cross was formerly Vinerian Professor of Law at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.

Design encompasses some of the highest cognitive abilities of human beings, including creativity, synthesis and problem solving. A substantial and varied range of research methods has been developed and adopted for the analysis of design activity, but until now it has been difficult to compare the work of different researchers using different methods. This book contains the results of an international workshop held in Delft, The Netherlands, which focused on one particular research method, that of protocol analysis. Researchers from seventeen different leading centres around the world were invited to analyse the same video recordings of designers working on an engineering product design. The 20 chapters in this book are the records of that workshop, providing rich insights into the design process and an overview of accumulated knowledge on design from these researchers. There is also a discussion of the properties and limitations of protocol analysis as a research technique for analysing design activity. The book is a substantial contribution to developing understanding of the nature of design activity, and is of value to researchers, teachers and practitioners of design.