About 150 countries run on legal codes descended from ancient Rome
The world's most widespread legal system does not rely on judges building law case by case. Instead, roughly 150 countries follow compact written codes whose ancestry runs back to Roman law, reshaped by Napoleon's code of 1804 and Germany's civil code of 1900. English-style common law is the minority tradition.
Civil law goes by several names, among them Romano-Germanic, neo-Roman and Continental law. The term itself renders the Latin jus civile, citizens' law, the late imperial name for Rome's own legal order as opposed to the rules applied to conquered peoples; hence the title of Justinian's great compilation, the Corpus Juris Civilis. Over the centuries this Roman core was layered with canon law, feudal and local custom, Germanic and Napoleonic influences, and schools of thought such as natural law and legal positivism.
Its method starts from abstractions. General principles come first, substantive rules are kept separate from procedure, and court rulings rank below legislation. The code is the centrepiece: a systematic, subject-ordered body of short articles, passed by a legislature, that sets out principles instead of trying to anticipate every factual situation. That contrasts with ordinary statutes, which tend to be long and detailed. Codification aims to give every citizen a written statement of the law that judges are bound to apply.
The common law, born in medieval England, works the other way round. Its rules grow from uncodified judicial decisions, and earlier rulings bind later courts as precedent. Civil law is often associated with inquisitorial trials, in which judges lead the inquiry, but the two ideas are not the same thing.
Judges in civil law countries still matter. A consistent run of similar decisions, called jurisprudence constante, carries weight even though it is not formally binding. Styles differ too: French-influenced supreme courts issue terse rulings with little explanation, while courts in Germanic Europe write fuller reasoned opinions. Oddly, systems that officially lean little on case law still produce enormous numbers of reported decisions, mostly published unofficially or commercially, since only the top courts must publish.
Source: Civil law (legal system)
