The Distinctive Features of Common Law

Common law is a real oddity in the world's laws. It emerges out of case reports with never any attempt to sort of systematize it in a single code, he says. Law students would write down what they heard the judges say, but compare their notes. And that helped to formalize and systematize as well. The common law gradually evolved this sense of formality. So there's a lot of substance of the law developed in the forms of writs.