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Britain is unusual in another regard, too. Its legal system - or at least that of England, Wales and Northern Ireland - is based on common law rather than civil law. While around a third of the world's population operates under some form of common law, most of the EU works with Roman-based civil law. Only Cyprus and the Republic of Ireland are in company with Britain. The difference between the two systems is worth exploring. Most legal systems are top-down: a law is written down in the abstract and then applied to particular disputes as they arise. But the common law, bizarrely, was never planned. It grew from beneath like a coral, each judgment serving as the starting-point for the next case. How did it begin? No one really knows. And, in theory, you might not expect it to work as well as a rational civil law system does. Yet, in practice, there has been no surer guarantee of freedom. As John Adams, the second president of the United States, put it, 'The liberty, the unalienable, indefeasible rights of men, the honour and dignity of human nature and the universal happiness of individuals, were never so skilfully and successfully consulted as in that most excellent monument of human art, the common law of England.'