From our legal history, Great Britain, for the most part, Parliament passed few statutes and instead had the King's (Queen's) judges rule on various disputes both public and private. Often, custom, history, and culture, influenced how the judge ruled. Key figures in understanding the history of common law include Bracton, Coke, and Blackstone. Most of the origin of common law is shrouded in myth and legends about the Anglo-Saxon laws and practices before the Norman conquest. Thus, in English legal history, you had an uncertain Anglo-Saxon practice and custom, layered over with French customs and language, layered over with canon law which was influenced by Roman law.
Because Parliament passed so few laws, in the first wave, Bracton reconciled the practices and customs of alleged Anglo Saxon law with medieval Norman law in the 13th Century. Littleton in about the 15th century focused on developments in land law that represented a large portion of the court's work at the time. Coke, in the 1600's, summarized in his Law Reports and subsequent Institutes, case reports that used both Bracton, Littleton, and "right reasoning" to resolve cases. Coke based his ideas on individual rights under the crown by way of property law summarized in Littleton. Blackstone, shortly before the American Revolution, overlaid the Enlightenment and philosophical interpretations of cases in a systematic replication of Justinian's Code, only with common law. We inherited as a result common law which more or less governed the U.S. practice of law until the codification movements around the 1860's began to take form.
Over time, legislatures and bureaucracies have made statutes and codes primary, based in part on common law ideas, but increasingly becoming more like a civil law system. There are some areas of the law that still have more common law than not; but other areas such as the criminal and commercial codes have become almost wholly reliant on statutes instead of relying on common law precedents.
Civil law countries, by comparison, used Roman law as a foundation, which was last compiled by Emperor Justinian in his code. Justinian's legal scholars made rationality rather than precedent as key. The idea for a civil lawyer is to refer to the source of law as inspiration rather than particular cases. Cases are used to illustrate the legal principles in the code rather than as a source for development of the law. Development of the law is to be left to those with authority to make law (legislators or kings, not judges.
Might find this link on common law useful. https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu...&httpsredir=1&article=3959&context=fss_papers
