“It is a staple of popular fiction—The Da Vinci Code is a prominent recent example—for a scholar, after inspired and painstaking work, to reveal hidden mysteries encoded in ancient manuscripts that alter our understanding of ourselves and our civilization. Remarkably, the legal scholar Thomas Lund, has, in real life, done just that. Here, after hundreds of years, is a readable, brilliant, and deep study of the sources of the basic principles of the Anglo-American Legal System still in use today—the medieval Year Books—until now utterly inaccessible except to a few specialists in the most arcane legal history. This amazing and delightful book will be of profound interest to anyone who has ever believed that the rule of law is about more than the arbitrary machinations of politicians. Simply stated, Thomas Lund has given us one of the most important works on law in this generation.”
STEPHEN B. PRESSER, Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History, Northwestern University School of Law
“The goal of Thomas Lund’s Creation of the Common Law is to render a selection of material from the Year Books accessible to an educated lay audience, which wants to understand how medieval English law actually worked. He has performed his task with a clarity and economy that are admirable—and with a certain beguiling whimsy. The book is altogether a stunning achievement and will be especially valuable for the light it throws on subjects dear to the hearts of medievalists who are not in themselves legal specialists, indeed, who have tended to avoid the linguistically forbidding Year Books.”
WILLIAM CHESTER JORDAN, Princeton University
“An innovative invitation to the fascinating world of the medieval English Yearbooks. Professor Lund opens this vast range of law reports to the scrutiny of students of modern as well as medieval law. Within his book, Chief Justice Bereford and Christopher Columbus Langdell meet to provide a highly original schooling in the early Common Law.”
JOHN HUDSON, University of St Andrews
“Modern lawyers and laypeople are often daunted by the inaccessibility of the early sources... It is for just this reason that this masterful compilation and commentary by Professor Thomas Lund offers such a great contribution to the study of the history and evolution of our legal culture. On topic after topic, reading the colloquies at the bench, we can see all the players jockeying for rhetorical advantage. One of the great joys of Lund’s writing is that he casts these materials as part of a complex narrative, organized by topic. Beautifully encapsulated in paraphrase, the cases preserve the urgency and spontaneity of the arguments.... Treat the book as a series of connected episodes that can be read in large or small chunks. Open up to any page or section, read for amusement and enlightenment, and then return to the larger text on some future day. These materials are rich, and they will richly reward those who are willing to work their way through them.”
Foreword, RICHARD EPSTEIN, New York University School of Law
