Common law Quotes

“It is difficult to struggle with the common law.”

“I am not for stirring a single pebble of the common law.”

“Whatever is by the common law, can only be affected by statute.”

“common law”

“Common law is common usage, and where there is no law there can be no transgression.”

“Wikipedia: Common law”

“The common law is the custom of the kingdom, and we are bound to know it, and must be all governed by it.”

“I here give my opinion as a Common Lawyer; not presuming to say what the Court of Chancery would do upon the same question.”

“Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason... The law, which is perfection of reason.”

“Great attention and respect is undoubtedly due to the decisions of a Lord Chancellor: but they are not conclusive upon a Court of common law.”

“The Court of Common Pleas is the lock and key of the common law.”

“The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.”

“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.”

“We ourselves of the present age, chose our common law, and consented to the most ancient Acts of Parliament, for we lived in our ancestors 1,000 years ago, and those ancestors are still living in us.”

“The Common lawes of the Realme should by no means be delayed for the law is the surest sanctuary, that a man should take, and the strongest fortresse to protect the weakest of all, lex est tutissima cassis.”

“Yet the whole structure of the common law is an obvious denial of this theory; it stands as a monument slowly raised, like a coral reef, from the minute accretions of past individuals, of whom each built upon the relics which his predecessors left, and in his turn left a foundation upon which his successors might work.”

“The common law, though not to be found in the written records of the realm, yet has been long well known. It is coeval with civilised society itself, and was formed from time to time by the wisdom of man. Good sense did not come with the Conquest, or at any other one time, but grew and increased from time to time with the wisdom of mankind.”

“I shall always as far as I can by law endeavour to support the common law of the land and that excellent method of trial by juries, upon which all our lives, liberties and properties depend; and I shall endeavour as far as I can to prevent the encroachment of any jurisdiction whatever that proceeds by another law and another method of trial.”

“There is no doubt whatever that as far as common law is concerned, the Courts in this country have been bound, most of them, by inflexible rules handed down in great measure from the time of the Plantagenets, and until certain modern statutes were passed there was no possibility of altering or improving them.”

“In a perfectly new case—a case altogether primae impressionis—I think the Judges are bound to hold fast to the principles of the common law—to remember the maxim, "Salus reipublicae suprema lex," and if the condition be really in principle against the public good, to pronounce it in their judgment void.”