Law
Germany's legal system is a civilian system whose highest source of law is the 1949 Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (which essentially serves as the nation's constitution), which sets up the modern judiciary, but the law adjudicated in court comes from the German Codes; thus, German law is primarily codal in nature. The court system adjudicates (1) public law (öffentliches Recht), that is, administrative law (civil-government litigation or litigation between two government bodies) and criminal law, and (2) private law (Privatrecht). German law is mainly based on early Byzantine law, specifically Justinian's Code, and to a much lesser extent the Napoleonic Code.
German law is not impregnated with legal positivism to the extent of Napoleonic legal systems, so Germany's judiciary is not subordinated to the legislature, the Basic Law directly invests supreme judicial power in the Constitutional Court as well as other federal courts and the courts of each Länder, and decisional law has greater importance, though not to the extent of common law systems. The court system is inquisitorial, thus judicial officers personally enter proof and testimony into evidence, with the litigants and their counsel merely assisting, although in some courts evidence can only be tendered by litigants.
Read more about this topic: Courts In Germany
Famous quotes containing the word law:
“You can no more bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the law courts. Passions are facts and not dogmas.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“There is all the difference in the world between the criminal’s avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedient’s taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Laws can be wrong and laws can be cruel. And the people who live only by the law are both wrong and cruel.”
—Ardel Wray. Mark Robson. Thea (Ellen Drew)