The Common Law: A Very Short Introduction

The common law began as England's national system of adjudication for correcting wrongs, protecting rights, and enforcing due administration of government in the Royal courts. Its origins can be traced back to 11th century England, and was soon exported to the rest of Britain and ultimately to the far-flung reaches of the British Empire. The common law has therefore enjoyed nearly a thousand years of development and elaboration, in many lands, influenced by but separate from the systems of continental Europe, with its own distinctive procedures of pleading, fact-finding, and remedies. It developed laws that govern much of today's world of trade, business, and finance; it defended ideas of personal liberty and equality before the law; and it helped establish principles of constitutional, legally-limited government, and administration. Thus the common law provides an original and crucial strand in the history of social organization, politics, and culture around the world.

In this Very Short Introduction Joseph Getzler explains the evolution of the common law. The main institutions of the common law are described - courts, procedures, judges and juries, and means of reporting, analysing, and learning the law; and the main categories of common-law rights and duties are delineated - property, contract, and tort, equitable claims, unjust enrichment, crime, constitutional and public law, and civil liberties.

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Joshua Getzler, Professor of Law and Legal History, University of Oxford; Fellow and Tutor in Law, St Hugh's College, Oxford

Joshua Getzler is Professor of Law and Legal History at the university of Oxford and a Fellow of St Hugh's College Oxford. He was educated in history and law at the Australian National University and the University of Oxford. He has taught at Oxford since 1993. He combines modern legal research, looking at institutions of commercial and financial law, with historical research, chiefly trusts and property in the 18th and 19th centuries, with glances at the influence of Civilian and religious laws on more modern jurisprudence. He has taught and researched at the Australian National University, the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania, and he holds an adjunct post at the University of New South Wales.