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.
Law of the land
Littleton Powys, a judge of the King's Bench, wrote in 1704 with reference to Magna Carta: "lex terrae is not confined to the common law, but takes in all the other laws, which are in force in this realm; as the civil and canon law..." In 1975, political scientist Keith Jurow asserted that the term "law of the land", as understood by Lord Coke, includes "only" the common law, but that assertion by Jurow was called "manifestly wrong" in a 1990 article by Brigham Young Law School professor Robert Riggs.