2J2 THE BRITISH APPROACH TO POtlTICS

Law, arising from ancient custom, Statute Law composed from
Acts of Parliament, and Equity, whose origins will be described
later. The King's judges of Norman and Plantagenet times
found that the people expected justice to conform to certain
traditions which varied from one part of the country to another;
it was the judges* task to build out .of these traditions a system
of rules which would be common to the whole country. This
Common Law is nowhere written down as Acts of Parliament
are; but in the course of years a vast number of cases have been
settled, according to the principles of Common Law, and the
judges' decisions are recorded; from these decisions the Common
Law may be deduced and applied to future cases. Further,
Acts of Parliament do not always succeed in saying dearly what
they mean; and in doubtful cases the Courts must decide the
meaning of the Act as best they can. He who wishes, therefore,
to understand English Law must know not only the Statutes
and the Common Law, but the decisions given in "Leading
Cases". So it is sometimes said that there is another type of
law, "judge-made law", though lawyers insist that they do not
make the law/but only declare and explain it. Yet the phrase
"judge-made law" is not wholly misleading; it is an invariable
rule that a decision given by a judge as to what the Common Law
is or what the Statutes mean, shall be accepted as a rule to be
applied in all similar cases, until it is set aside by a judge of a
higher court, or until a new Act of Parliament settles the matter
beyond doubt. Thus in 1901 the Law Lords, in accordance
with an established legal principle, decided in the Taff Vale case
that a Trade Union could be compelled to pay damages out
of its funds for unlawful acts committed by some of its servants
even though it had strenuously opposed such acts. Few people
had realised that the Statutes atx>ut Trade Unionism would have
this effect; certainly Parliament had not so intended. The highest
court in th$ land, however, had decided, and their decision was,,,
in feet, part of the law until in 1906 Parliament, by the Trade
Disputes Act, expressed its meaning clearly. It should be noticed