Every day, whether they acknowledge it or not, large numbers of altruistic individuals provide substantial and essential services for elderly and disabled people in the absence of any legal duty. In doing so, many such informal carers suffer financial and other disadvantages. This book considers the scope for a ‘private law’ approach to rewarding, supporting or compensating carers in their vital role, in English law and beyond. As most of those who knew me in 2007 can attest, finding a topic for my doctoral thesis was a painful process. I was fascinated by the issues raised by the sorts of personal relationships, typified by that between the Burden sisters,1 that are not usually a target of family law at all. Some of my contemporaries seemed to think I was writing a whole thesis on the Burden case, but the focus of my inquiry ultimately became a small aspect of one of the great questions of our time. That may sound rather big-headed, but any big-headedness is balanced by two major factors. First, I make no claim to have solved what I might call the ‘conundrum’ of providing and paying for the social care upon which increasing numbers of us will depend in the decades to come. Indeed, the thesis that was somehow submitted in August 2010, and is now presented in a revised, expanded and updated form, probably raised more questions than it answered. No doubt that will annoy many readers of the resulting book and at least one of my supervisors, but it is a symptom of the reality that the solution to the complex social ‘problem’ of care cannot be left solely, or even mainly, to lawyers. Secondly, some will find my decision to focus on private law at best strange and at worst offensive. Nevertheless, I still maintain that the ‘private law of carers’ was a subject worthy of investigation, not least because there is so much of it out there. I hope this book will be of some use to those working in private law and others who have an interest in social and legal perspectives on care.