This is the Cater Daily podcast for Thursday, January 2nd, 2025.

I'm Caleb Brown.

And happy new year.

When people think about the law, they usually think of legislation, the prospective creation of rules to tell us how we're allowed to behave.

And that's too bad because the common law,

according to Georgetown University's John Hasnes, has a remarkable track record of addressing

real problems without demanding that a legislature weigh in. Hasnes is author of Common Law Liberalism,

a new theory of the libertarian society. We spoke in December.

It seems like your book here takes on a gargantuan task, but it seems pretty valuable. The idea that

we have these different competing ideas about how law is established and or different methods for establishing

law. And you sort of want to put them through their paces in terms of which gives us a

more, a better, more harmonious society, better public policy. So if you wouldn't mind,

differentiate for me the differences between the common law and legislation. Sure. Most people,

when they think about the law today, think about legislation. Legislation is the law that's created by the state legislatures, by the Congress, by the political representatives who are tasked with making the law. So that's the law that's consciously made by political agents. But in our system,

we have a much older law that forms the substructure of our society. That's the common law.

And common law is law that evolves slowly over time from the settlement of actual cases,

which when they give good results are recognized, copied, and repeated in courts. So the law of contracts, the law of the commercial

law that undergirds our society was all created in this form. So tort law, which is personal

injury law, is the same property law.

Most of the law that shows human beings how to interact peacefully and successfully came about

through this slow, repeated process of settling cases and was never created intentionally by political representatives.

So both of those are part of our legal system. Our legal system still has common law.

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