Welcome

Chapter 16-Common Law

Very few people alive today have attended a trial at common law.  What happened to common law, and why are we not using it today?  
   
Prior to the widespread availability of our current legal system, there was the common law.  Common law, or what some may call the natural or scientific law, dealt with the interactions of man with man and mans relationship to property.  This concept flourished in the new world with it’s concepts of liberty and responsibility.  It was also the antithesis of the Equity, Maritime or Admiralty Law that England used to suppress the colonies.
   
With this natural law and the concept of individual freedom, everyone was free to make their own choices in life unless their choices infringed on the freedom of another or if it caused injury, physically or to ones property.  For instance, one could ride their horse through town at break neck speeds; but unless I caused some injury it was not against the law, as there was no injured party.  
   
The second type of law, as we know it today is political or statute law.  Here things get murky because law becomes a thing of enactment.  Rules were put into place solely for the rules sake, and some emotional need of the people.  
   
One major problem with common law is that the rules, although similar, would vary from community to community.  As no two communities were identical in makeup and history, the legal necessities inherent to that system would be different.  This was based on how law was administered in prior cases.  There were no written laws, per se, but more a way of living, when someone trespassed against another, a mediator would listen to both sides of the story and would render a decision.  The decisions, in effect, established “laws of behavior.”