ny time any Common Law principle or practice, while, on
the other hand, no development of the Common Law can repeal an act of
Parliament.

[Footnote 240: W. M. Geldart, Elements of English
Law (London and New York, 1912), 9. As this author
further remarks, "if all the statutes of the realm
were repealed, we should have a system of law,
though, it may be, an unworkable one; if we could
imagine the Common Law swept away and the Statute
Law preserved, we should have only disjointed rules
torn from their context, and no provision at all
for many of the most important relations of life."]

*175. The Form of the Law.*--Statute law takes invariably, of course,
written form. The acts of Parliament are to be found in imposing
printed collections, to which a substantial volume is added every
year. Of the Common Law, however, there is no single or authoritative
text. The Common Law grew up originally as unwritten law, and in a
large measure it preserves still that character. The sources, however,
from which knowledge of it must be drawn are mainly in writing or in
print. The most important are (1) the decisions of the judges of the
English courts (reported anonymously in Year Books from the reign of
Edward I. to that of Henry VIII., and thereafter by lawyers reporting
under their own names) which from at least the sixteenth century
acquired weight as precedents and are nowadays all but absolutely
decisive in analogous cases; (2) the decisions of courts of other
countries in which there is administered a law derived from the English,
such decisions being, of course, not binding, yet highly influential;
and (3) certain "books of authority" written by learned lawyers (p. 169)
of earlier times, such as Coke's seventeenth-century Commentary on
Littleton's Tenures and Foster's eighteenth-century treatise on Crown
Law. Some small branches of the Common Law have, indeed, been codified
in the form of statutes, among them the law of partnership, that of
sales, and that of bills of exchange.

*176. The Rules of Equity.*--There is one other body of English law
which requires mention, namely, the rules of equity. These rules had
their origin in the administration of an extraordinary sort of justice
by the king's chancellor in mediaeval times, a practice which arose
from