David Sugarman 218 mon law has paralleled and sustained sovereign, stable and singular notions of cultural identities; and an Anglo-Centric, highly introverted, pre-democratic conception of the British nation, one extremely ambivalent towards modernity and a less divisive world, nationally and internationally. This has probably been the dominant characterisation of law, identity and community in Britain. On the other hand, the common law has also paralleled and sustained notions of Britishness that are cosmopolitan, contingent, hybrid and pluralistic. IV As is well known, of all the countries of Western Europe, England has been the least influenced by Roman or Civil law. It is unique in neither experiencing a full-blooded reception of Roman law between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries nor trainingthe bulk of its lawyers in the Civilian tradition. The legal and political cultures of the Common law world have been profoundly shaped by this ongoing repudiation of the Civil lawtradition. It explains, for example, why the idea of codification has never attracted whole-hearted support in the common law world. It also explains why English law lacks a strong sense of the State, as does much else within the British intellectual tradition.The influential writings of eminent common lawyers such as Sir John Fortesue and Sir Edward Coke are illustrative of this hostility to Roman law. Within this context, legal thought and legal history in England reflected and sustained several conceptualisations of law. For our purposes, two such discourses are particularly important. First, there is the idea of lawas immemorial custom, rooted in the distant past, the only law that England had known. In this brogue, legislation served merely to clarify or confirmthe common law, which remained essentially unchanged in its perfection. Here, lawis essentially an incremental, backward-looking and mysterious process best left to the legal community, and above all, to its high priests and guardians, the judges. It was, and probably still is, the most important single way of conceptualising the common law. Its pedigree is long, as it is illustrious. From Fortescue’s dialogue in praise of the laws of England, De Laudibus LegumAngliae, written during 1468-71 for the instruction of Henry Vi’s son; to Coke’s oft-quoted seventeenth-century formulations, which asserted that only those who had practised the law could interpret it. FromBlackstone’s eighteenth-century celebration of the hidden perfection of the common law, to the present century, and the consecration of constitutional lawas neither history nor politics but as essentially private law in character, pre-democratic and therefore superior to anything else in world, especially the French. This way of talking about law—what John Pocock has called the “common law mind”—was not only important within the legal domain, but was also a major political language in its own right. " Dyson, Kenneth. The State Tradition in Western Europe. Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1980, p. 199.
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