The Common Law became somewhat more popular when the principles of individual rights which had blocked Stuart oppression were used against George III. After the Revolution, however, it suffered with all things English. Many lawyers had been Loyalists. The commercial depression turned the bar into debt collectors. The great decisions of Lord Mansfield which laid the foundations of modern business law were rejected by Jefferson and many other Americans because of that judge’s reactionary policy towards the Colonies. Many States actually passed legislation forbidding the use of English cases as authorities in our courts. The enforcement of the Common Law of sedition and criminal libel by judges, many of whom had been educated in England, identified the Common Law with the suppression of freedom of speech. Nevertheless, the old simple Colonial rules were insufficient to decide the complex commercial questions which were constantly arising, especially in maritime transactions. Aid had to be obtained from some mature system of law. At this moment a rival to the Common Law presented itself in the Napoleonic code of 1804, attractive to the populace just because it was French, and to many of the bar because of its logical arrangement and because unlike English lawyers they were widely read in Roman and modern Continental law. For a time it was actually doubtful whether the legal assistance which American judges needed would be drawn from England or France. French writers were cited in the courts and Livingston drafted a code on the Napoleonic model for Louisiana. The English law had, however, one great advantage. It was written in our own language. Furthermore, a group of exceptionally able judges such as Joseph Story and James Kent, by their decisions and writings, virtually imported the great bulk of the Common Law into this country and reworked it to meet American conditions. Nevertheless, this law was something that came from outside and had not grown up altogether from the lives and thoughts of our own people, so that it has never meant to Americans what English law means to Englishmen, for whom it is as much a product of their own land as parliamentary government or the plays of Shakespeare.