I think the primary route to improvement here is in changing the relationship between the past and your presentist second part. It might be that the present is too present here, and that more attention should be paid to the past, but I'm willing to grant the ratio. What is needed, then, is a close and more analytical connection. To say that law structures power on behalf of those who own enough to make law is pretty easy, but precisely for that reason not very informative. To say that diversity in the society---of "ethnicity," language, and culture---was made more harmonious and less oppressive over time because the common law was a system for architecting localism into a centralizing political arrangement is not so easy, but you can show it. That may have direct relevance to the state of our large, diverse, and very strained common law empire in North America.