LAW 200- Spirit of Common Law

Perhaps no institution of the modern world shows such vitality and tenacity as our AngloAmerican legal tradition which we call the common law. Although it is essentially a mode of judicial and juristic thinking, a mode of treating legal problems rather than a fixed body of definite rules, it succeeds everywhere in molding rules, whatever their origin, into accord with its principles and in maintaining those principles in the face of formidable attempts to overthrow or to supersede them. In the United States it survives the huge mass of legislation that is placed annually upon our statute books and gives to it form and consistency. Nor is it less effective in competition with law of foreign origin. Louisiana alone of the states carved from the Louisiana purchase preserves the French law. In Texas only a few anomalies in procedure serve to remind us that another system once prevailed in that domain. In California only the institution of community property remains to tell us that the Spanish law once obtained in that jurisdiction. Only historians know that the custom of Paris once governed in Michigan and Wisconsin.