Exceptions
Much of Louisiana law is derived from French and Spanish civil law, which stems from its history as a colony of both France and Spain. Puerto Rico, a former Spanish colony, is also a civil law jurisdiction of the United States. However, the criminal law of both jurisdictions has been necessarily modified by common law influences and the supremacy of the federal Constitution.
Furthermore, Puerto Rico is also unique in that it is the only U.S. jurisdiction in which the everyday working language of court proceedings, statutes, regulations, and case law is Spanish. All states, the federal government, and most territories use American English as their working language. Some states, such as California, do provide certain court forms in other languages (Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Vietnamese) for the convenience of immigrants and naturalized citizens. But American law as developed through statutes, regulations, and case law is always in English, attorneys are expected to take and pass the bar examination in English, judges hear oral argument, supervise trials, and issue orders from the bench in English, and testimony and documents originating in other languages is translated into English before being incorporated into the official record of a case.
Many states in the southwest that were originally Mexican territory have inherited several unique features from the civil law that governed when they were part of Mexico. These states include Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas. For example, these states all have a community property system for the property of married persons (Idaho, Washington, and Wisconsin have also adopted community property systems, but they did not inherit them from a previous civil law system that governed the state). Another example of civil law influence in these states can be seen in the California Civil Code, where the law of contracts is treated as part of the law of obligations (though the rules actually codified are clearly derived from the common law).
Many of the western states, including California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming use a system of allocating water rights known as the prior appropriation doctrine, which is derived from Spanish civil law. It should be noted that each state has modified the doctrine to suit its own internal conditions and needs.
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Famous quotes containing the word exceptions:
“... people were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fools’ caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else’s were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect. A man does not see, that, as he eats, so he thinks: as he deals, so he is, and so he appears; he does not see that his son is the son of his thoughts and of his actions; that fortunes are not exceptions but fruits; that relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always; no miscellany, no exemption, no anomaly,—but method, and an even web; and what comes out, that was put in.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud—and it is here above all that exceptions prove the rule—that everything that exists in nature exists in art.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)