Law: Encyclopedia II - Law - Legal traditions

Law - Legal traditions

There are generally four broad legal traditions that are practiced in the world today.

Law - Civil law

The civilian system of law is a codified law that sets out a comprehensive system of rules that are applied and interpreted by judges. It is by and large the most commonly practiced system of law in the world, with almost 60 % of the world's population living in a country ruled on the civilian system.

The most important difference to common law is that normally, only legislative enactments are considered to be legally binding, but not precedent cases. However, as a practical matter, courts normally follow their previous decisions. Furthermore, in some civil law systems (e.g. in Germany), the writings of legal scholars have considerable influence on the courts.

In most jurisdictions the core areas of private law are codified in the form of a civil code, but in some, like Scotland it remains uncodified. The civil law system has its origins in Roman law, which was adopted by scholars and courts from the late middle ages onwards. Most modern systems go back to the 19th century codification movement. The civil codes of many, particularly Latin countries and former French and Spanish colonies closely trail the Code de Napoléon in some fashion. However, this is not true for most Central and Eastern European, Scandinavian and East Asian countries. Notably, the German BGB was developed from Roman law with reference to German legal tradition.

The importance of the Code Napoléon should also not be overemphasized as it covers only the core areas of private law, while other codes and statutes govern fields such as corporate law, administrative law, tax law and constitutional law.

Law - Common law

The Common Law is an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, based on unwritten laws developed through judicial decisions that create binding precedent. The Common Law system is currently in practice in Australia, Canada (excluding Quebec), United Kingdom, and the United States (although Louisiana uses both the Common Law and Napoleonic Civil Law). In addition to these countries several others have adapted the Common Law system into a mixed system. For example, India and Nigeria operate largely on a common-law system but incorporate a good deal of customary law and religious law.

Law - Customary law

Customary law are systems of law that have evolved largely on their own within a given country and have been adapted to meet the needs of the particular culture. Note that customary law may also be relevant within jurisdictions following another legal tradition in fields or subfields of law where no legislative enactment exists. For example, in Austria, scholars of private law often claim that customary law continues to exist, whereas public law scholars dispute this claim. (In any case, it is hard to find any practically relevant examples.)

Law - Religious law

Many countries base their system of law on religious tenets. The most dominant system of this form of law is the Sharia, or Islamic law.

On a smaller level there are still regions of the world that practice canon law, which is followed by Catholics and Anglicans, and a similar legal system is used by the Eastern Orthodox Church. The same can be said for Jewish law (halakha or halacha), which is followed by Orthodox and Conservative Jews, in substantially different forms. However, Christian canon law copes almost solely with ecclesiastical relations, unlike Sharia, which relates also to civil law (like property rights, contracts, partnerships and covering damages) and administrative law.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Legal traditions", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki