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Aug 25, 2023 · Civil law has been adopted in much of Latin America as well as in parts of Asia and Africa. The origin of civil law can be traced back to the Roman Empire, which developed a sophisticated legal system based on the concept of jus civile (civil right).
term civil law derives from the Latin ius civile, the law applicable to all Roman cives or citizens. Its origins and model are to be found in the monumen-tal compilation of Roman law commissioned by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century CE.
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civil law, the law of continental Europe, based on an admixture of Roman, Germanic, ecclesiastical, feudal, commercial, and customary law. European civil law has been adopted in much of Latin America as well as in parts of Asia and Africa and is to be distinguished from the common law of the Anglo-American countries.
The term civil law has other meanings not employed in this article. The term jus civile, meaning “civil law,” for example, was used in ancient Rome to distinguish the law found exclusively in the city of Rome from the jus gentium, the law of all nations, found throughout the empire. The phrase has also been used to distinguish private law, governing the relations between individuals, from public law and criminal law. Finally, in the philosophy of law, civil law sometimes refers to the positive law of the state, as distinct from natural law.
In the 5th and 6th centuries ce, western and central Europe were dominated by Germanic peoples, especially those who had overrun the Roman Empire. Among them were the Anglo-Saxons of England, the Franks of western Germany and northern France, the Burgundians, the Visigoths of southern France and Spain, and the Lombards of Italy. Although the traditions of Roman law endured for some time, Germanic customs came to prevail in most regions. In the Middle Ages these customs underwent vigorous growth in an effort to satisfy the complex needs stemming from the development of feudalism and chivalry, the growth of cities, Eastern colonization, increasing trade, and an increasingly refined culture. Among the many strands that went into the weaving of the complex pattern of medieval law, the customs of merchants and the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church were of special significance. It was principally through the canon law that the concepts and ideas of ancient Rome continued to make their presence felt even when, as a whole, Roman law itself had been forgotten. In the late 11th century, Roman law was rediscovered and made the subject matter of learned study and teaching by scholars in northern Italy, especially at Bologna. With the increasing demand for trained judges and administrators, first by the Italian city-republics and then by princes in other localities, students flocked to Bologna from all over Europe, until the study and teaching of law were gradually taken over by local universities. As a result of this process, Roman law penetrated into the administration of justice north of the Alps, especially in Germany and the Netherlands, where the Roman-law influence became particularly strong.
In the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, the reception of Roman law was facilitated because its emperors cherished the idea of being the direct successors of the Roman Caesars; Roman law, collected in the Code of Justinian (Corpus Juris Civilis) by the emperor Justinian I between 527 and 565, could be regarded as still being in effect simply because it was the imperial law. Decisive for the reception, however, was the superiority of the specialized training of Roman-law jurists over the empiricist methods of lay judges and practitioners of the local laws. Equally decisive was the superiority of the Roman-canonical type of procedure, with its rational rules of evidence, over the local forms of procedure involving proof by ordeal, battle, and other irrational methods. Nowhere, however, did Roman law completely supplant the local laws, and, as far as the content of the law was concerned, various amalgams developed. Roman law strongly influenced the law of contracts and torts; canon law achieved supremacy in the field of marriage; and combinations of Germanic, feudal, and Roman traditions developed in matters of property and succession, or inheritance. The conceptual formulations in which the norms and principles of the law were expressed, as well as the procedural forms in which justice was administered, were also strongly Roman. The system that thus emerged was called the jus commune. In actual practice it varied from place to place, but it was nevertheless a unit that was held together by a common tradition and a common stock of learning. Although the law of the Corpus Juris Civilis (especially its main part, the Digest—the writings of the jurists) was, as such, in effect nowhere, it constituted the basis of study, training, and discourse everywhere. In spite of all local variety, the civil-law world experienced a sense of unity that corresponded to the strongly felt unity of European civilization.
This unity was undermined by the religious divisions of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and by the rise of nationalism that accompanied the unification and stabilization of the European nations and their struggle for hegemony. In the field of law the split found expression in the national codifications, through which the law was unified within each nation but was simultaneously set apart from that of all others. In Denmark codification occurred in 1683, in Norway in 1687, in Sweden-Finland in 1734, and in Prussia in 1794. Because of the personality of their promoter and the novel technique applied, great fame and influence were achieved by the Napoleonic codifications of the private and criminal law of France, especially their central piece, the civil code of 1804 that came to be known as the Napoleonic Code.
Codification continued after the Napoleonic era. In Belgium and Luxembourg, which had been incorporated into France under Napoleon, his codes were simply left in effect. The Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and numerous countries of Latin America followed the French model not only by undertaking national codification but also by using the same techniques and arrangements. Naturally, their courts and legal scholars were, at least in the early 19th century, inclined to pay great attention to French legal learning.
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Nov 19, 2014 · Civil law is a body of rules that defines and protects the private rights of citizens, offers legal remedies that may be sought in a dispute, and covers areas of law such as contracts, torts, property and family law. Civil law is derived from the laws of ancient Rome which used doctrines to develop a code that determined how legal issues would ...
The civil law legal tradition is characterized globally by a historical reliance on Roman law; a modern rationalist code and no body of judge-made case law under the code; textualism and formalism; and the absence of jury trial and an inquisitorial approach to civil and criminal procedure.
Jan 12, 2020 · Humanities › Issues. What Is Civil Law? Definition and Examples. By. Elianna Spitzer. Updated on January 12, 2020. Civil law is both a legal system and a branch of law. In the United States, the term civil law refers to court cases that arise over a dispute between two non-governmental parties.
Feb 12, 2024 · Schaefer, Hans-Bernd, Civil Law as a Common European Heritage, Challenges for Law and Economics and for Comparative Law (January 29, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4709299 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4709299. Download This Paper. Open PDF in Browser.
