> *English Common Law* has entered the chat

Still romanian. "The common law—so named because it was common to all the king's courts across England—originated in the practices of the courts of the English kings in the centuries following the Norman Conquest in 1066" [1]

France (and Normandy) was conquered by Rome before it was granted to Rollo, a Viking. A few generations later, his descendant William the Conqueror claimed the English crown. Just like what happened with Gauls and Romans, the conquered people adopted large parts of the language and customs of the conqueror. That's why the English language is ~25% of Roman origin for it's vocabulary. I suppose it is the same for English common law.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#History

This brings to mind the wonderful Econtalk episode about Bruno Leoni [0]. The beginning of the podcast describes his untimely passing, which almost seems a Cohen brothers movie plot.

  So, we pore over Supreme Court cases on the First Amendment, for example, to 
  try to interpret what tests we will use to determine whether something is 
  going to be unconstitutional law. Leoni didn't want that. He argued that--and 
  again, he was proud of the Roman law contribution. He said that the Roman 
  jurist was a sort of scientist: that the object of his research was a 
  solution to cases that citizens submitted to him for study. So, an 
  industrialist or a scientist might look to a physicist to engineer a 
  technical problem. So, private Roman law was something to be described or 
  discovered, not something to be enacted. So, over time, these principles 
  emerge.