Structure and Value in the Common Law

Common law concepts have fallen into disrepute among legal theorists. The rise of Legal Realism in the early twentieth century marked a turning point in legal thought and analysis. One of the defining characteristics of the movement was complete disregard, not to say contempt, towards legal conceptualism. The founding fathers of the movement viewed the core concepts of the common law as devoid of any independent meaning or functional significance. They considered the common law’s conceptual edifice indeterminate and manipulable so as to render it altogether contingent on the working of the system. Walking along the same path, efficiency-minded scholars see the common law system as a collection of rules that are in reality motivated solely by the ideal of wealth maximization. In this view, legal concepts exist in the common law to further its economic goals, or are otherwise completely redundant. Legal philosophers, for their part, have chimed in as well, characterizing the common law’s concepts as embodying their own autonomous commitment to reason, which they see as altogether independent from the instrumental goals of the law. With the general move towards instrumentalism in American legal analysis and thinking, the net result has been that common law concepts are seen today as largely vestigial artifacts. In this Article, we mount a defense of the common law’s architecture. We argue that the criticisms leveled by legal theorists at the common law’s extensive use of legal concepts are misguided. In treating the common law’s conceptual architecture as a contingent feature of the system, these criticisms fail to account for how the common law has endured over time and context, and in the face of changing social values and preferences. The persistence of the common law and its continuing vitality is in large measure attributable to the subtle balance that it achieves between stability and change, a balance for which it relies almost entirely on its conceptual structure. Our core thesis is that the common law’s commitment to its conceptual structure is in many ways the key to understanding not just how the common law works but, in addition, what the common law itself is