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Article: Common sense and common law.(Common-Law Liberty: Rethinking American Constitutionalism)(Book Review)
- Article from:
- First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life
- Article date:
- February 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Institute on Religion and Public Life. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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COMMON-LAW LIBERTY : RETHINKING AMERICAN CONSITITIONALISM. By JAMES R. STONER, JR. University Press of Kansas. 208 pp. $29.95.
FOR MOST PEOPLE the term "common law" summons up quaint images of wigged British judges and piles of dusty law books. For many practicing lawyers and law professors such images represent the surface of a deeper and unamusing reality, an archaic system of legal thought. In that system judges superstitiously thought they could discover in prior cases an objective reality called "law." Modern legal thought, so the story goes, is more realistic. It understands that judges inevitably make policy while deciding cases, and suggests that in doing ...