Civil Law Vs Common Law

[chenaniggans14]

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Hey there

I'm looking for a detailed explanation of civil and common law to help with an essay topic for my latest assessment. My text book doesnt have a detailed enough explanation.

Be great if you could help.

Thanks.

[Omnidragon]

Well basically Civil Law is what they use in countries like China, Australia, London and some former British colonies like France, Spain and Italy. It means the basic premise is that civilities represents the pinnacle of divine justice, while Lockean theory would say otherwise.

Common Law is used for more common (ie low-class or less posh) countries like Japan and New Zealand. It's based on the system of putting the person forward first and has a Marxist element to it.

[Strawbaby]

Haha, what a classic.
Australia is a common law country, having adopted the system from Britain on colonisation.
Civil law is, in essence, code-based law derived from the Roman legal system. Think of it as really legislation controlling everything, with not much of a focus on precedent (previous decisions governing the direction of later decisions).
Common law derives from the precedent of case law - judges making decisions over time rule what decisions can later be made, making decision-making generally quite consistent over time but also making understanding the law quite difficult at times.

If you need this stuff in great detail, go to a law library at a university - they ought to have some good basic books for students on the topic. Failing that, Wiki is decent as well.

[eschew]

well just wish this reply won't be too late

1. as mentioned above most of the countries which are UK's past colonies or related to UK are almost common law system, including AU,USA, however you should bear in mind that Louisiana & Scotland are civil law. Moreover if you're interested with it , ottawa university made a world map which marked the distribution of the two systems with different colors.

2. The codification.Common law countries seldom condify their clauses, most of theirs are case law. the codification here i refers to compiling law systematically with certain standar. you can see common law countries also have code, but they are not as sysmatical as civil law's , just compare with the Germany civil code, you'll find out the difference.

3.The judicial form. On the one hand, the two system's hearing form is different. juges in common law are not as "powerful " as civil law. you may be more clear than me how they hear cases, my text books call it adversary system. In civil law juge has the ultimate power to make decision, parties are just to help him to find out the truth based on the evidence. On the other hand ,To dig deeper, The difference mentioned in 2 leads to the difference of legal reasoning methodoloy between the two systems. Analogy is widely used in the porcess of reasoning by common law judges, since they need to compare current case with former cases(case law), while syllogism is the ordinary method used by Civil law judges. because of the fixed as well as claused laws, they need to put cases into niches to deduce the decision.

these are my three cents ,wish they can help you, if anyone have anything needs to be discussed about them, feel free to reply~