A Natural History Of The Common Law

How does law come to be stated as substantive rules, and then how does it change? One of Britain's most acclaimed legal historians focuses on the development of English common law--the intellectually coherent system of substantive rules that courts bring to bear on the particular facts of individual cases--from which American law was to grow.

This introductory text explores the historical origins of the main legal institutions that came to characterize the Anglo-American legal tradition, and to distinguish it from European legal systems. The book contains both text and extracts from historical sources and literature. The book is published in color, and contains over 250 illustrations, many in color, including medieval illuminated manuscripts, paintings, books and manuscripts, caricatures, and photographs.

Originally published: 5th ed. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1956.

How does law come to be stated as substantive rules, and then how does it change? In this collection of discussions from the James S. Carpentier Lectures in legal history and criticism, one of Britain's most acclaimed legal historians S. F. C. Milsom focuses on the development of English common law—the intellectually coherent system of substantive rules that courts bring to bear on the particular facts of individual cases—from which American law was to grow. Milsom discusses the differences between the development of land law and that of other kinds of law and, in the latter case, how procedural changes allowed substantive rules first to be stated and then to be circumvented. He examines the invisibility of early legal change and how adjustment to conditions was hidden behind such things as the changing meaning of words. Milsom points out that legal history may be more prone than other kinds of history to serious anachronism. Nobody ever states his assumptions, and a legal writer, addressing his contemporaries, never provided a glossary to warn future historians against attributing their own meanings to his words and therefore their own assumptions to his world. Formal continuity has enabled nineteenth-century assumptions to be carried back, in some respects as far back as the twelfth century. This book brings together Milsom's efforts to understand the uncomfortable changes that lie beneath that comforting formal surface. Those changes were too large to have been intended by anyone at the time and too slow to be perceived by historians working within the short periods now imposed by historical convention. The law was made not by great men making great decisions but by man-sized men unconcerned with the future and thinking only about their own immediate everyday difficulties. King Henry II, for example, did not intend the changes attributed to him in either land law or criminal law; the draftsman of De Donis did not mean to create the entail; nobody ever dreamed up a fiction with intent to change the law.

"This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a free and responsible individuals."

Presents an ambitious narrative and fresh re-assessment of common law and natural law's varied interactions in America, 1630 to 1930.

The Spirit of the Common Law is one of Roscoe Pound's most notable works. It contains the brilliant lectures he delivered at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1921. It is a seminal book embodying the spiritual essence of sociological jurisprudence by its leading prophet. This work is both a celebration of the common law and a warning for common law judges and lawyers to return to and embrace the pragmatism and judicial empiricism that define and energize the common law. The two fundamental doctrines of the common law, Pound writes, are the doctrine of precedents and the doctrine of supremacy of law. In an earlier preface, Justice Arthur J. Goldberg writes that The Spirit of the Common Law will always be treasured by judges and lawyers for its philosophy and history, but more importantly for Roscoe Pound's optimism and faith in the capacity of law to keep up with the times without sacrificing fundamental values. It is a faith built upon the conviction that the present is not to be divorced from the past, but rather that the past and the present are to be built upon to make a better future. Neil Hamilton and Mathias Alfred Jaren provide a biographical introduction to the book. They discuss the various influences upon Pound's scholarly pursuits and they analyze many of his writings that led up to The Spirit of the Common Law. This volume is a necessary addition to the libraries of legal scholars and professionals, sociologists, and philosophers.

Only paperback edition of great legal classic. Lucid, accessible coverage of liability, criminal law, torts, contracts, more, from historical perspective. New introduction by Sheldon M. Novick. Table of Cases.