"The Common Law" changed America forever. The lectures - which were given at the Lowell Institute in Boston and subsequently published in 1880 - created a buzz of excitement that enveloped the New England intellectual community. Over a century later, we can look back at "The Common Law" and still feel the same sense of excitement that our predecessors did, virtually undiminished by the tumultuous decades of American jurisprudence that have followed. It remains an exhilarating landmark in law because both its content and its style, its substance and its process, perfectly mirror what common law is: a complex and diffuse combination of actual cases, history, analysis, and philosophy - all woven together to create the rules by which we live.

Introduction by: Tom Schweich