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:
“Who to himself is law, no law doth need, Offends no law, and is a king indeed.”
—George Chapman (c. 1559–1634)
“At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgment of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)