On the last page of their classical history of the English Law, Pollock and Maitland wrote these words : ‘The men who were gathered at Westminster round Patteshull and Raleigh and Bracton (in the thirteenth century) were penning writs that would run in the name of kingless commonwealths on the other shore of the Atlantic Ocean. They were making right and wrong for us and for our children.

The rules of right and wrong that were framed by these prelates and judges of the Middle Age constitute the Common Law of England, a system of law that rules not only England (and Ireland), but also the Dominions of Canada and Australia and New Zealand and (in great measure) India and most of the colonies and possessions of the Crown. The Common Law rules also ‘those kingless commonwealths on the other shore ol the Atlantic Ocean,’ the states of the American Union, with the single exception of Louisiana.

The Common Law is thus one of the two great systems of Law and of legal tradition by which the world was governed before the war. The other system is the system and tradition of the Roman Law, which governed the great continental countries of Europe and their non-European dependencies. The Roman Law has a history of twenty-five centuries.. It was accordingly pagan in origin. It reflected what Lord Acton has called the vice of the classical state : it was Church and State in one. Divine honours were paid to the Emperor. And the law recognised or drew a sharp distinction between free man and slave; and between citizen and stranger.