The spirit of the common law

Roscoe Pound was Carter Professor of Jurisprudence at Harvard University in the first half of the twentieth century. This text, derived from a series of lectures given in the 1910s, has held up over time (its initial publication was in 1921, and has been reissued periodically ever since) as a touchstone of historical and theoretical explorations of what common law is and how it operates, both in the British and American contexts.