Much more than an historical examination of liability, criminal law, torts, bail, possession and ownership, and contracts, The Common Law articulates the ideas and judicial theory of one of the greatest justices of the Supreme Court. The John Harvard Library presents a text that is, with occasional corrections of typographical errors, identical to that found in the first and all subsequent printings by Little, Brown.

During his career at Harvard, Morton Horwitz changed the questions legal historians ask. In this book, Horwitz’s students re-examine legal history from America’s colonial era to the late twentieth century. The essays are, like Horwitz, provocative and original as they continue his transformation of American legal history.