Note (Back) — Chapter VIII

174. Statute Law and Common Law.—From at least the seventeenth century law has been conceived of in England as exclusively the body of rules, of whatsoever origin or nature, which can be enforced in the regular courts. As it has taken form, it falls into two principal categories. The one is statute law, the other is the Common Law. Statute law consists of specific acts of Parliament, supplemented by by-laws, rules, and regulations made under parliamentary sanction by public officials and bodies. Chronologically, it begins in 1235, in the reign of Henry III.; and inasmuch as it is amended and amplified at substantially every parliamentary session, the bulk of it has come to be enormous. The more comprehensive and fundamental part of English law, however, is, and has always been, the Common Law. The Common Law is a product of growth rather than of legislation. No definite time can be assigned for its beginning, for at as early a period as there are reports of judicial decisions the existence of a body of law not emanating from law-makers was taken for granted. Long before the close of the Middle Ages the essentials of the Common Law had acquired not only unquestioned sanction but also thoroughgoing coherence and uniformity. Despite the greatly increased legislative activity of modern times, it still may be said that the rules of the Common Law are fundamental, the laws of Parliament but incidental. Statutes regularly assume the principles of the Common Law, and are largely, as one writer has put it, "the addenda and errata" of this law, incomplete and meaningless save in co-ordination with the legal order by which they are supported and enveloped.[240] Thus no act of Parliament enjoins in general terms that a man shall pay his debts, or fulfill his contracts, or pay damages for trespass or slander. Statutes define the modes in accordance with which these obligations shall be met, but the obligations themselves are derived entirely from the Common Law. It is, however, a fixed rule that where statutes fall in conflict with the Common Law it is the statutes that prevail. The limitless competence of Parliament involves the power to set aside or to modify at any time any Common Law principle or practice, while, on the other hand, no development of the Common Law can repeal an act of Parliament.