History
The term "common law" originally derives from the 1150s and 1160s, when Henry II of England established the secular English tribunals. The "common law" was the law that emerged as "common" throughout the realm (as distinct from the various legal codes that preceded it, such as Mercian law, the Danelaw and the law of Wessex) as the king's judges followed each other's decisions to create a unified common law throughout England. The doctrine of precedent developed during the 12th and 13th centuries, as the collective judicial decisions that were based in tradition, custom and precedent.
The form of reasoning used in common law is known as casuistry or case-based reasoning. The common law, as applied in civil cases (as distinct from criminal cases), was devised as a means of compensating someone for wrongful acts known as torts, including both intentional torts and torts caused by negligence, and as developing the body of law recognizing and regulating contracts. The type of procedure practiced in common law courts is known as the adversarial system; this is also a development of the common law.
Read more about this topic: Common Law Legal Systems
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“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)