Civil law
Civil law or European Continental law or Romano-Germanic law is the principal system of law in the world. Civil law is the legal tradition that derives from Roman law. The countries discovered in this category have drawn principally on their Roman legal inheritance in addition to other sources, and while giving anteriority to written law, have determinedly selected for a systematic codification of their ordinary law. Also found in this category are countries, usually of the mixed law diversity, that have not resorted to the method of codifying law but that have retained to varying degrees enough elements of Roman legal construction, "as a written reason", to be considered associated to the civil tradition. On the other hand, there are countries in this category where Roman influence was feebler but whose law, codified or not, rests on the concept of legislated law which in many ways resembles the systems of countries with a "pure" civil tradition (for example, Scandinavian countries that maintenance a unique position within the "Romano-Germanic" family).
In civil law the sources recognized as authoritative are, principally, legislation – especially codifications in constitutions or statutes passed by government – and, secondarily, custom. In some civil law countries, the legal systems are established around one or various codes of law, which set out the most important principles that conduct the law. The most famous example is possibly the French Civil Code, even though the German Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (or BGB) and the Swiss Civil Code are also landmark events in legal history. The civil law systems of Scotland and South Africa are without codifying, and the civil law systems of Scandinavian countries remain largely without codifying.
Civil-law systems vary from common-law systems in the substantive content of the law, the operative procedures of the law, legal terminology, the way in which authoritative sources of law are recognized, the institutional framework within which the law is applied, and the education and structure of the legal profession.
Scholars of comparative law and economists instigating the legal origins theory generally subdivide civil law into three different groups:
- French civil law: in France, the Benelux countries, Italy, Spain and former colonies of those countries;
- German civil law: in Germany, Austria, Croatia, Switzerland, Greece, Portugal, Turkey, Japan, South Korea and the Republic of China;
- Scandinavian civil law: in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Finland and Iceland inherited the system from their neighbors.
Within the United States and its territories, only three jurisdictions are considered civil-law systems—Louisiana, Puerto Rico, and Guam—but because of the strong persuade of common law in these jurisdictions, they are truly “mixed systems” of civil and common law. Under the Supreme Court's ruling in Erie v. Tompkins (1938), Louisiana courts are the final authority on subjects concerning topics of civil law under the Louisiana Code of 1870. Similarly, courts in Puerto Rico and Guam have responsibility for the expansion of the civil law in those island jurisdictions.
Civil law is generally of tangential interest to the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices of the Supreme Court are results of the American common-law tradition, and, with few exceptions, they have not been familiar with civil-law sources or systems. Nevertheless, with the expansion of international private law, the increasing commercial significance of the European Union and Japan, and growing contacts among legal practitioners and legal elites across national limits, the Supreme Court will have to come to conditions with the civil law tradition, the most extended and significant legal tradition in the modern world.
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