How old is a tradition?

[Kid Cossack]

There is no such thing as Anglo American "common law". Two separate countries sharing an arbitrary law structure, highly unlikely don't you think?

I'm not even sure that America, the U.S., has such a thing as "common law". I have the feeling that part of the uprising in 1766 was to get rid of that.

The UK does, although that is being reduced. It's still strong in Scotland's law. I hope somebody in the UK can update us on that.

You can google it to find the references, I did, successfully.

In any case, this is taking us away from the topic and the point of my original post.

To paraphrase Monty Python: contradiction/challenge (tracking your posts today) is not conversation. The debate paradigm says that you should posit your counter, i.e. provide where in British law tradition is defined. Then I defend my statement, etc. That way we both learn something.

Your call, until then, I'm "standing down" and not getting drawn in further.

I could give two flips about how long it takes to create a tradition, but there is, or was, a thing called Anglo-American common law. I don't think it existed in England (where they probably just called it "common law" or even "our common law" or perhaps even "English common law" if they were going to draw a distinction between it and American common law), but it really did exist in America.

For all of the early fractiousness between (independent) America and the United Kingdom, we were/are, to a real degree, your children. To pick only one extraneous example, the mess nights I attended in the USMC probably differed only around the edges from mess nights in the Royal Marines.

While we split off from English common law long enough ago to qualify as a different sub-species, we did still spring from the same roots. Several of my professors at law school used the term "Anglo-American common law."

Now, common law is increasingly being replaced in America, as well, with codes and statutory law but well up into the 20th century American jurisprudence was shaped to a very real degree by the common law that had developed in the United Kingdom/Great Britain.