proposition is afforded by the fact that the
sovereign may not be sued or prosecuted in the
ordinary courts; but this immunity, as matters now
stand, is of no practical consequence.]

*174. Statute Law and Common Law.*--From at least the seventeenth
century law has been conceived of in England as exclusively the body
of rules, of whatsoever origin or nature, which can be enforced in the
regular courts. As it has taken form, it falls into two principal
categories. The one is statute law, the other is the Common Law.
Statute law consists of specific acts of Parliament, supplemented by
by-laws, rules, and regulations made under parliamentary sanction by
public officials and bodies. Chronologically, it begins in 1235, in
the reign of Henry III.; and inasmuch as it is amended and amplified
at substantially every parliamentary session, the bulk of it has come
to be enormous. The more comprehensive and fundamental part of English
law, however, is, and has always been, the Common Law. The Common Law
is a product of growth rather than of legislation. No definite time
can be assigned for its beginning, for at as early a period as (p. 168)
there are reports of judicial decisions the existence of a body of
law not emanating from law-makers was taken for granted. Long before
the close of the Middle Ages the essentials of the Common Law had
acquired not only unquestioned sanction but also thoroughgoing
coherence and uniformity. Despite the greatly increased legislative
activity of modern times, it still may be said that the rules of the
Common Law are fundamental, the laws of Parliament but incidental.
Statutes regularly assume the principles of the Common Law, and are
largely, as one writer has put it, "the addenda and errata" of this
law, incomplete and meaningless save in co-ordination with the legal
order by which they are supported and enveloped.[240] Thus no act of
Parliament enjoins in general terms that a man shall pay his debts, or
fulfill his contracts, or pay damages for trespass or slander.
Statutes define the _modes_ in accordance with which these obligations
shall be met, but the obligations themselves are derived entirely from
the Common Law. It is, however, a fixed rule that where statutes fall
in conflict with the Common Law it is the statutes that prevail. The
limitless competence of Parliament involves the power to set aside or
to modify at a