Common Law
the unwritten law, the law that receives its binding force from immemorial usage and universal reception, in distinction from the written or statute law; sometimes from the civil or canon law; and occasionally from the lex mercatoria, or commercial and maritime jurisprudence. It consists of that body of rules, principles, and customs which have been received from former times, and by which courts have been guided in their judicial decisions. The evidence of this law is to be found in the reports of those decisions and the records of the courts. It is contrasted with the statute law contained in acts of Parliament; equity, which is also an accretion of judicial decisions, but formed by a new tribunal, which first appeared when the common law had reached its full growth; and the civil law inherited by modern Europe from the Roman Empire. Wherever statute law, however, runs counter to common law, mon law, on the other hand, asserts its pre-eminence where equity is opposed to it.