the interests of a special group, hill farmers perhaps, who would lose economic
rights.
Common Law
Common law is the name usually given to the main system of laws and legal
practices in England and Wales, most of North America, and other countries
that were once part of the British Empire. It is the legal system that developed
after the Norman conquest of England, based initially on judicial interpreta-
tion of local customs, on judicial and royal decisions in important cases, and on
the rare acts of formal legislation contained in royal statutes. The essence of
common law is that it relies on the development of legal principles as they are
laid down in judicial rulings in particular cases. These rulings are themselves
usually developments or reinterpretations of earlier decisions in cases held to be
‘binding precedents’. The idea is one of slow growth and development, of a
legal system created by the judges themselves during the actual judicial process.
This is usually contrasted with thecivil lawsystem, in which law is deliber-
ately laid down as a complete, codified system by means of legislation.
Through much of English legal history the common law was supplemented
by another system, equity, in which cases were decided directly on the basis of
moral justice; it was introduced because common law, restricted in its scope by
previous cases, and by the small number of ‘writs’ under which one could
bring actions, was seen as too limited to give unfailing justice. As the range of
common law expanded, and equity itself became more and more rule-bound,
the two became merged during the 19th century.
In the 20th century an increasing commitment to democratic ideals made
the idea of autonomous judge-made law seem improper. This, and the massive
legislation required by the modern state, have much diminished the indepen-
dent creativity of the judiciary. In the early 1960s, for example, the House of
Lords announced, in effect, that no judge could contemplate creating a new
criminal offence. However, large areas of English law, especially the laws of
contract and of tort, are not codified, and principles can only be discovered by
identifying significant precedents. In these and other areas there is still con-
siderable scope for judges to develop law without waiting for parliament to
legislate. Furthermore, to interpret the meaning of statute law often involves
highly creative judicial work, and the real impact of a statute may depend more
on what judges have said in a case which concerned it than on parliament’s
original intention. The law of real property in the United Kingdom, for
example, was intended to be codified by the 1925 Law of Property Act and
some subsequent minor acts. To a large extent it is, except that what Clause 9,
Section ii, Para B of the Act actually means requires reading several dozen cases
where the House of Lords has ‘interpreted’ it. The common law in other
Common Law