Civil Law
Civil law or Continental law or Romano-Germanic law is the predominant system of law in the world. Civil law as a legal system is often compared with common law. The main difference that is usually drawn between the two systems is that common law draws abstract rules from specific cases, whereas civil law starts with abstract rules, which judges must then apply to the various cases before them.
Civil law has its roots in Roman law, Canon law and the Enlightenment. The legal systems in many civil law countries are based around one or several codes of law, which set out the main principles that guide the law. The most famous example is perhaps the French Civil Code, although 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 uncodified, and the civil law systems of Scandinavian countries remain largely uncodified.
History
Legal systems across the world. Civil law is blue; other systems are common law (pink), mixed civil and common law (brown), custom (green) and fiqh (yellow).
The civil law system is based on Roman law, especially the Corpus Juris Civilis of Emperor Justinian, as later developed by medieval legal scholars.
The acceptance of Roman law had different characteristics in different countries. In some of them its effect resulted from legislative act, i.e. it became positive law, whereas in other ones it became accepted by way of its processing by legal theorists.
Consequently, Roman law did not completely dominate in Europe. Roman law was a secondary source, that was applied only as long as local customs and local laws lacked a pertinent provision on a particular matter. However, local rules too were interpreted primarily according to Roman law (it being a common European legal tradition of sorts), resulting in its influencing the main source of law also.
A second characteristic, beyond Roman law foundations, is the extended codification of the adopted Roman law, i.e. its inclusion into civil codes.
The concept of codification developed especially during the 17th and 18th century, as an expression of both Natural Law and the ideas of the Enlightenment. The political ideal of that era was expressed by the concepts of democracy, protection of property and the rule of law. That ideal required the creation of certainty of law, through the recording of law and through its uniformity. So, the aforementioned mix of Roman law and customary and local law ceased to exist, and the road opened for law codification, which could contribute to the aims of the above mentioned political ideal.
Another reason that contributed to codification was that the notion of the nation state, which was born during the 19th century, required the recording of the law that would be applicable to that state.
Certainly, there was also reaction to the aim of law codification. The proponents of codification regarded it as conducive to certainty, unity and systematic recording of the law; whereas its opponents claimed that codification would result in the ossification of the law.
At the end, despite whatever resistance to codification, the codification of European private laws moved forward. The French Napoleonic Code (code civil) of 1804, the German civil code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch) of 1900 and the Swiss codes were the most influential national civil codes.
Because Germany was a rising power in the late 19th century and its legal system was well organized, when many Asian nations were developing, the German Civil Code became the basis for the legal systems of Japan and South Korea. In China, the German Civil Code was introduced in the later years of the Qing Dynasty and formed the basis of the law of the Republic of China, which remains in force in Taiwan.
Some authors consider civil law to have served as the foundation for socialist law used in Communist countries, which in this view would basically be civil law with the addition of Marxist–Leninist ideas.
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