The Statutorification of Common-Law Fields

Abstract

This chapter describes the process, over an interval between the years after World War I and the 1960s, in which most of the fields considered “basic” common-law subjects in legal education and the legal profession were dramatically affected by statutory developments that sought to modify common-law rules and doctrines in the fields. By the 1960s the “statutorification” of torts, contracts, commercial law, and criminal law was partially in place, and new rules for federal civil procedure had been promulgated.