Civil Law (legal System) - Overview

Overview

The purpose of codification is to provide all citizens with an accessible and written collection of the laws which apply to them and which judges must follow. It is the most widespread system of law in the world, in force in various forms in about 150 countries, and draws heavily from Roman law, arguably the most intricate known legal system dating from before the modern era. Colonial expansion spread the civil law which has been received in much of Latin America and parts of Asia and Africa.

Where codes exist, the primary source of law is the law code, which is a systematic collection of interrelated articles, arranged by subject matter in some pre-specified order, and that explain the principles of law, rights and entitlements, and how basic legal mechanisms work. Law codes are usually created by a legislature's enactment of a new statute that embodies all the old statutes relating to the subject and including changes necessitated by court decisions. In some cases, the change results in a new statutory concept. Other major legal systems in the world include common law, Halakha, canon law, and Islamic law.

Civilian countries can be divided into:

• those where civil law in some form is still living law but there has been no attempt to create a civil code: Andorra and San Marino
• those with uncodified mixed systems in which civil law is an academic source of authority but common law is also influential: Scotland and Roman-Dutch law countries (South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and Guyana)
• those with codified mixed systems in which civil law is the background law but has its public law heavily influenced by common law: Louisiana, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Philippines
• those with comprehensive codes that exceed a single civil code, such as France, Germany, Greece, Japan, Mexico: it is this last category that is normally regarded as typical of civil law systems, and is discussed in the rest of this article.

The Scandinavian systems are of a hybrid character since their background law is a mix of civil law and Scandinavian customary law and have been partially codified. Likewise, the laws of the Channel Islands (Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, Sark) are hybrids which mix Norman customary law and French civil law.

A prominent example of a civil-law code would be the Napoleonic Code (1804), named after French emperor Napoleon. The Code comprises three components: the law of persons, property law, and commercial law. Rather than a compendium of statutes or catalog of caselaw, the Code sets out general principles as rules of law.

Unlike common law systems, civil law jurisdictions deal with case law apart from any precedence value. Civil law courts generally decide cases using statutory law on a case-by-case basis, without reference to other (or even superior) judicial decisions. In actual practice, an increasing degree of precedence is creeping into civil law jurisprudence, and is generally seen in the nation's highest court. While the typical French-speaking supreme court decision is short, concise and devoid of explanation or justification, in Germanic Europe, the supreme courts can and do tend to write more verbose opinions supported by legal reasoning. A line of similar case decisions, while not precedent per se, constitute jurisprudence constante. While civil law jurisdictions place little reliance on court decisions, they tend to generate a phenomenal number of reported legal opinions. However, this tends to be uncontrolled, since there is no statutory requirement that any case be reported or published in a law report, except for the councils of state and constitutional courts. Except for the highest courts, all publication of legal opinions are unofficial or commercial.

Civil law is sometimes referred to as neo-Roman law, Romano-Germanic law or Continental law. The expression civil law is a translation of Latin jus civile, or “citizens’ law”, which was the late imperial term for its legal system, as opposed to the laws governing conquered peoples (jus gentium); hence, the Justinian code's title Corpus Juris Civilis. Civilian lawyers, however, traditionally refer to their system in a broad sense as jus commune, literally "common law", meaning the general principles of law as opposed to laws peculiar to particular areas. (The use of "common law" for the Anglo-Saxon systems may or may not be influenced by this usage.)