Conservatives are not in the business of conserving just any law, institution or custom. Their desire is to conserve the institutions that embody collective solutions to recurring problems, and which pass on socially generated knowledge. In Burke's view (and mine) the common law is such an institution; so are political institutions like representative government, and social institutions like marriage and the family. These are institutions that foster the habit of sacrifice, and which therefore generate the motive on which the husbanding of resources depends.
(Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy [London and New York: Continuum, 2006], 38)
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 