In England the burden of history weighs heavily on common law, that unwritten code of time-honored laws derived largely from English judicial custom and precedent.
Main Point
You can't really understand common law without talking about its historical development, but at law schools they usually don't treat it as a historically developing phenomenon. Goodrich has my back; common law is best studied as a continually developing tradition. (End of First Paragraph and Beginning of Second Paragraph, Third Paragraph)
Purpose / Framework
Identify Problem, Discuss Potential Solution
Passage Map
P1: Background context for problem - common law is steeped in history; you can't understand it properly without understanding the long history on which its built.
P2: Identify Problem and Reasons - law school should be, but isn't, teaching common law with this long historical perspective. They aren't for theoretical (they like pretending it's a self-standing regime of logic) and political (they don't want people thinking laws are just capricious cultural traditions).
P3: Someone Offering a Solution - Goodrich says teach common law as an evolving narrative tradition, not a dry, timeless set of rules. It will feel almost more like studying literature than studying pure logic.
Other Commentary
This passage is famously hard. Many students emailed their teachers in horror the day this one was administered, because of how hard this RC passage was. It's a good opportunity to practice a "worst case scenario" reading strategy.
If we know the most common place to find the Main Point is after the Author's Pivot (but, yet, however, recently) towards the end of the first paragraph / beginning of the second, then we'll correctly find that the first paragraph is where the author shows us the main event. That's where we take our time and find simpler, personal wording to self-summarize the thesis.
You have to place common law in a historical context to understand it, but law schools aren't doing that!
When we see the framing idea in line 21, we just say . That line warns us that we'll get a theoretical reason and a practical reason. The beginnings of lines 23 and 30 tell our brain that we're just fleshing out those two things. This is not something we need on a first pass, because it's subsidiary.
When we start that last paragraph, we're pausing to remind ourselves of the big picture: law schools should be teaching common law with a historical perspective, but they're teaching it as a timeless set of rules for two reasons.
Because line 40-43 gives us another big pivot (however), we need to slow down and size up what this point of view is. It turns out to be reinforcement of the author's main point: we should be teaching common law with history / tradition in the forefront.
That's a pretty functional big picture understanding. We're using structural and rhetorical signposts to find the biggest moments (lines 12-18 and 40-43) and we're slowing down a lot to understand those moments, and reminding ourselves to self-summarize those big points as we continue reading, so that we don't lose sight of them.