This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,

the show where America is the star and the American people. Up next,

the second episode of our series about us, the story of America. And here to tell it is Hillsdale

College Professor Bill McLeigh, author of the fantastic book, Land of Hope. We owe much of who we are today to our mother country, England,

and how different it was from the rest of Europe.

Let's get into the story.

Take it away, Bill.

England was really lucky to be cut off from the continent.

The English Channel's not much of a moat to us today.

You know, you can drive from London to Paris in a car. But in those days, the channel was a pretty

formidable obstacle. It meant that the culture developed quite independently, and the English

had their own distinctive institutions. Institutions like

common law, a view of law that is very protective of the rights of the people, of individual

people, as a result of the fact that common law is customary law, a case at law that's decided by common law is decided on the

basis of what did a judge do before? What is the precedent? This is where the whole idea in our law

of precedent as an important element in rendering a judicial decision comes from. It comes from the

English common law is, as I say, customary law. It's hard to tell the difference between custom

and law, because in some ways the law is the codification of what's customary. This is a very

different way of looking at law. It's not systematic.

It's not abstract.

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