Hobbes is generally best known for his contribution to social and political philosophy, whilst his legal thought tended to get neglected. This paper examines Hobbes’s specific ideas on the common law. His legal thoughts did not just relate to a collection of particular norms, he was more concerned with constructing a jurisprudence, of which his theory of the common law was an integral part. While law played an important role in Hobbes’s political thought, it was not his starting point but rather something towards which he built throughout his life. This may also be grounded in the fact that, certainly during Hobbes’s time, there had been some reluctance to construct philosophical premises of the common law into a theoretical whole
