Civil law (legal system)
Comparison with other legal systems

Civil law is primarily contrasted with the English common law that influenced the legal traditions of the English-speaking countries.

The primary contrast between the two systems is the role of written decisions and precedent as a source of law (one of the defining features of common law legal systems). While Common law systems place great weight on precedent, civil law judges tend to give less weight to judicial precedent. For example, the Napoleonic Code expressly forbade French judges to pronounce general principles of law. There is no doctrine of stare decisis in the French civil law tradition. There are regular, good quality law reports in France, but it is not a consistent practice in many of the existing civil law jurisdictions. In French-speaking colonial Africa there were no law reports and what little we know of those historical cases comes from publication in journals. Civil law codes must be changed constantly because the precedent of courts is not binding and because courts lack authority to act if there is no statute.

In some civil law jurisdictions the judiciary does not have the authority to invalidate legislative provisions. For example, after the fall of the Soviet Union the Armenian Parliament, with substantial support from USAID, adopted new legal codes. Some of the codes introduced problems which the judiciary was not empowered to adjudicate under the established principles of the common law of contracts - they could only apply the code as written.

Codification, however, is by no means a defining characteristic of a civil law system. For example, the statutes that govern the civil law systems of Sweden and other Nordic countries and the Roman-Dutch countries are not grouped into larger, expansive codes like those in French and German law.

In actual practice, an increasing degree of precedent is creeping into civil law jurisprudence, and is generally seen in many nations' highest courts.

Some authors consider civil law the foundation for socialist law used in communist countries, which in this view would basically be civil law with the addition of Marxist-Leninist ideals. Even if this is so, civil law was generally the legal system in place before the rise of socialist law, and some Eastern European countries reverted to the pre-socialist civil law following the fall of socialism, while others continued using a socialist legal systems.
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