Common law
The common lawso named because it was "common" to all the king's courts across Englandoriginated in the practices of the courts of the English kings in the centuries following the Norman Conquest in 1066. The British Empire spread the English legal system to its historical colonies, many of which retain the common law system today. These "common law systems" are legal systems that give great precedential weight to common law, and to the style of reasoning inherited from the English legal system.
Common law
While he was still on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and before being named to the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. published a short volume called "The Common Law", which remains a classic in the field. Unlike Blackstone and the Restatements, Holmes' book only briefly discusses what the law "is"; rather, Holmes describes the common law "process". Law professor John Chipman Gray's "The Nature and Sources of the Law", an examination and survey of the common law, is also still commonly read in U.S. law schools.