Civil law is a legal system inspired by
Roman law, the primary feature of which is that laws are written into a collection, codified, and not determined, as in
common law, by
judges.
[1] The principle of civil law 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 prevalent and oldest surviving legal system in the world. Colonial expansion spread the civil law system and
European civil law has been adopted in much of
Latin America as well as in parts of
Asia and
Africa.
[2] The primary source of law is the law code, which is a
statute grouping rules and standards concerning a particular subject matter and arranged in classified order
[3]; a code may also be described as "a systematic collection of interrelated articles written in a terse, staccato style."
[4] 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. The two other major legal systems in the world are
common law and
Islamic law.
A prominent example of civil law would be the Code Napoleon (1804), named after French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. The Code comprises three components "Persons," "Things and Different Forms of Ownership," and "Different Ways of Acquiring the Ownership of Things." Rather than a catalog of judicial decisions, the Code consists of abstractly written principles as rules of law. [4]
Civil law is sometimes inappropriately referred to as Roman law or otherwise called Romano-Germanic law or continental civil law, especially by people under its jurisdiction. 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 legal systems of conquered or adversarial peoples.
The civil law system is based on Roman law, especially the Corpus Juris Civilis of Emperor Justinian, as later developed by the Middle Ages.[5]
