A Natural History of the Common Law

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.

S.F.C. Milsom is professor emeritus of law at Cambridge University.