1. An ancestor of this article was presented to a seminar for the Law Faculty of the University of Padua. A highly condensed version appears as pts I and II of ‘The Philosophy of the Common Law’ in J Coleman and S Shapiro (eds)The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and the Philosophy of Law(OUP Oxford 2002), where I made an attempt to link issues of classical common law jurisprudence to some issues currently being discussed by legal philosophers. This article was written in substantial part while I was Keith Massey Fellow of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I am grateful to the Institute and its donors for support of this work. Also, I have learned a great deal from the forthcoming work of Michael Lobban on this topic, although he takes issue with my reading of part of this tradition.
2. Milsom (n 3) 11.
3. Brand (n 3) has a short description of Henry II's centralizing efforts that is extremely clear and useful.