Common Law reverence is our key to lasting freedom.

One of the most significant insights into the history of Anglo-American law offered by F. A. Hayek concerns the superiority of common law over statute law in framing a free society. English common law, like much medieval law, Hayek maintained, reflected the underlying notion that law was not so much created as uncovered and that its principles were identical to the fundamental canons of justice upon which all free societies rest. It was this view of law that predominated in England until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when for the first time the European nation-states sought to use legislation to effect specific policies. As Hayek emphasized in Law, Legislation and Liberty, until the discovery of Aristotle's Politics in the thirteenth century and the reception of Justinian's code in the fifteenth . . . Western Europe passed through an epoch of nearly a thousand years when law was regarded as something given independently of human will, something to be discovered, not made, and when the conception that law could be deliberately made or altered seemed sacrilegious. The reason why England, unlike the continental countries, did not develop a highly centralized absolute monarchy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was its distinctive system of legal rules and procedures. What prevented such development, Hayek writes, was the deeply entrenched tradition of a common law that was not conceived as the product of anyone's will but rather as a barrier to abuse of power. Hayek elsewhere writes: This medieval view, which is profoundly important as background for modern developments, though completely accepted perhaps only during the early Middle Ages, was that the state cannot itself create or make law, and of course as little abolish or violate law, because this would mean to abolish justice itself, it would be absurd, a sin, a rebellion against God who alone creates law. For centuries it was recognized doctrine that kings or any other human authority could only declare or find the existing law, or modify abuses that had crept in, and not create law. Only gradually, during the later Middle Ages, did the conception of deliberate creation of new law legislation as we know it came to be accepted. (Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 163.) http://www.bcrevolution.ca/why_common_law.htm For more on the system of Common Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on April 9, 2006]

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Common Law Reverence Is Our Key To Lasting Freedom.

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