Thin legal libraries made frontier court law both freewheeling and archaic

Evidence

The poverty of source materials left a vacuum, filled in by Blackstone, local statutes, and native wit. Few lawyers were well enough trained to be able to distinguish the fossils in Blackstone from the living law back East. For this reason, court law was, simultaneously, freewheeling and curiously archaic. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 903