Common Law Essay

Common law is “judge made-law” and “includes law by judges when they interpret law (lecture notes, 11/16)”. Common law authors trusted that “natural law was too abstract and theoretical for their pragmatic, concretely focused minds…simply out of touch with concrete human affairs (Coleman 593)”. Therefore, common law was developed.

Common law has various aspects than the basic definition would anticipate. One imperative attribute is the progression of common law. Common law logicians believed that the law was constant, and they believed that looking into the law deeper and relying on reasoning would give an answer. Although common law has altered with time, “through these changes it maintained its integrity as a single, coherent body of law

Hale explained that common law reasoning was analytical, “arguing from one case to the next on the basis of perceived likeliness and differences and the location of the instant case in the landscape of common experience painted by the judge or lawyer in command of the full resources of the common law (Coleman 594)”. Hale also coined common reason, as artificial reasoning, and the analogical element was a feature of artificial reasoning. Hale believed that common law is shared and is an “intellectual competence, a discoursive faculty that that is learned through participation in practice of public forensic argument, situated in and moving about in a world of recorded experience of ‘human affairs and conversation’ (Coleman 595)”. The aspect of precedent in common law held that “no single judicial ruling has the authority of the law just in virtue of the judges having decided it, and future judges are free to test a prior court’s formulation of a rule or doctrine…in light of the legal community’s shared sense of reasonableness (Coleman 596)”. However, judge’s decisions did play an imperative role in common law. Hale states, “Although judicial decisions fail to make law properly so called, ‘they have great weight and authority in expounding, declaring, and publishing what the law of the kingdom is’ (Coleman