ABSTRACT
Common law at first may seem a bizarre creature. You have already seen judges interpretingstatutory law in cases like Prochnow and McBoyle, the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act case. And you are probably somewhat familiar with constitutional law, which empowers judges to set aside statutes or other actions of the government that conflict with the Constitution. We will examine each of these more familiar forms of law in Chapters 4 and 5. In common-law cases, however, judges do not decide what the official rules written in statutes or constitutions mean. They refer instead only to cases other judges decided in the past and the doctrines that have emerged from them. But, you might ask, if judges in common-law cases reason solely from earlier precedents, what were those precedents based on? The surprising answer is that they too were based on precedents, in fact chains of precedents that stretch back into the practice of law in England well before Columbus’s arrival in America.1
