The UK recognizes Sir William Blackstone and his notorious works relating to the law (commonlaw of england).

Seemingly; CommonLaw is alive and doing well.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.britainusa.com/sections/a...a= 24655&D=10

Common Law Common Bond Text of a speech by the Rt Hon The Lord Goldmith QC, British Attorney General, Philadelphia, 3 July 2002

Introduction

Judge Becker, Mr Harmelin..... Ladies and Gentlemen
You have demonstrated the most delightful disregard for history in inviting me to speak here in Philadelphia on the eve of the Fourth of July. For as you all know, about 200 years or so ago, Britain's normally harmonious relations with this part of the Americas went through a sticky patch because of a slight misunderstanding over taxes. Indeed, Britain's relations with Philadelphia and the American colonies as a whole deteriorated to the point that you declared independence and British troops occupied Philadelphia for a time. So I hope that your kind invitation to speak to you and my presence here today means that all is truly forgiven.

In that hope I can say that I am delighted to be here, as is Lady Goldsmith. We thank you for your generous welcome and hospitality. I thank you above all for the very great honour you do me and the Government in which I am privileged to serve by inviting me to give this address. On this remarkable occasion of the [re-dedication of Magna Carta] I want to take the opportunity to speak of the common roots of the peoples of the United States of America and the United Kingdom in the common law. I will then move to ask how the common law can help us face the challenges of the year 2002. In particular how it can help us balance the needs of liberty of the individual with the needs to protect our society.

No true lawyer could fail to rejoice to be in Philadelphia. For true lawyers must believe in liberty and the rule of law. And Philadelphia is the city of liberty and the rule of law. As the city of William Penn, who after repeated persecution for his religious beliefs sailed here to found a city of liberty and to become, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, "the greatest Law-giver the world has produced". We too in the United Kingdom have thanks to give to William Penn who, on his return to England in 1684, taught King James II the virtue of greater tolerance and persuaded him to release many imprisoned for their religious beliefs. And as the city where Jefferson himself wrote the Declaration of Independence which remains one of the finest expressions of liberty to be found anywhere in history, providing as Archibald McLeish, the poet and librarian of Congress said, "its proposal for the future of a society in which human liberty could flourish."

And for its unbreakable connection with the Declaration of Independence Philadelphia is also a more than fitting place to celebrate Magna Carta, and our great shared legal and political heritage. For McLeish was right to say that the Declaration of Independence was a part of a political and legal tradition that unites British and American peoples. Thomas Jefferson would have agreed. For he described his Declaration as "the Magna Carta of a new continent".

Indeed, the fact that it was in Philadelphia that the Constitutional Convention was held itself reinforces the claim of the City of Brotherly Love to symbolise our common legal heritage. Not because the break with Britain that the Convention heralded was one of the last acts in a constitutionally joined history. But because the very act of rebellion was founded in that common heritage of Magna Carta and the common law. As Justice Anthony Kennedy has wisely noted: "The American Constitutional System was inspired by fundamental confidence in law as a liberating force....When we declared independence, we conceived of our cause, we found our
identity, we justified our rebellion in legal terms."

The law in which the American founding fathers then had confidence was English common law, brought with the settlers as part of their culture and adapted to suit the social and economic conditions of the colonies. English legal texts were for long of great importance because there were few indigenous texts and no published case reports in the colonies until after the Revolution. When Blackstone published his Commentaries on the Laws of England in the 1760's they became a legal best seller in the colonies, where there was a dearth of legal material and great need of what one commentator has termed "a snappy overview of the common law system". History tells us that so popular was the work that Sir William Blackstone made a fortune; something which could be rivalled today in the world of legal writing I suspect only by John Grisham or Scott Thurow.

Magna Carta itself played a major role in the development of the constitutional thinking in America. Some 150 years before Blackstone the great jurist and judge - and I might add sometime Attorney General – Sir Edward Coke had effectively rediscovered Magna Carta and praised it as an affirmation of fundamental law and England's "ancient liberty". The idea of written documents protecting individual liberties took early root in Britain's American colonies, such as in the 1606 Charter for Virginia which declared for immigrants to the New World the same rights as they would enjoy in England. And in the years leading up to the Revolution countless pamphlets and resolutions drew support for their claim of rights from Magna Carta.

And just as the Declaration of Independence provided inspiration for the greatest declaration of individual liberty of the last 100 years: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, so too does the American Constitution find inspiration in the words of an English Charter of over 500 years before; most notably perhaps in the guarantee of "due process of law" in the 5th Amendment. As eminent legal historians and scholars including Dean Griswold have demonstrated, this most resonant of phrases - "due process de ley" in the Norman French - can be traced directly back to Article 39 of Magna Carta and to the promise that "No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land." These last words, 3 in the original Latin: "per legem terrae" have probably exercised, so wrote the distinguished human rights lawyer AH Robertson, a greater influence on the history of human liberties under the common law than any other text.

It is not only in the love of liberty and freedom that we find a common legal heritage (though that is an important topic to which I want to return). In all areas of the law and legal relations we can find our common heritage, from the laws of contract and tort, through property law and relations between family members, in all areas we share a common heritage. True that there developed many differences between our systems in many areas. The common law was adapted to meet the different social and economic needs of the colonies - such as the fact that the abundance of land and size of the country meant that America had a far higher proportion of people owning some land than in England and a greater interest in legal services of the kind that the middle class are used to: deeds and wills, laws of property, mortgages and contracts for debt. And being larger and more decentralized with no central body which could impose a single uniform standard the laws developed in different ways. Many of the developments here were good and would come back, as I shall want to demonstrate, to fertilise the native legal soil of England.

This was not universally true, for example; the legal innovation of the law and practice of slavery was not known to the law of England or the common law.
But though these differences be marked, they should not obscure the unifying principles and features that flow through both our sets of laws: that each has the right to own property and enjoy the fruits of his labour, that contracts made in fair dealing and giving effect to the reasonable expectations of reasonable men should be honoured and, where necessary, enforced; that those who inflict unjustified harm on others or on the commun

Summa Ratio est quae pro Religione facit. If ever the laws of God and man are at variance, the former are to be obeyed in derogation of the latter.