Civil Laws

In the formulation of the system of rules and regulations which is intended to knit a civil society together and guarantee the safety and well-being of its citizens, an essential question to be taken up for consideration for the drafters of such a system is the issue of whether the emphasis and principal methodology of the system of law should consist of an adherence to abstract principle or of a more loosely, flexibly defined system based on the application of decision-making tools to prior experience with cases. In the case of the United States and the United Kingdom, the latter such approach largely holds sway over the conducting of the system of law, which is referred to as common law. Another general type of approach for setting up a legal system is represented by the category referred to as civil law, which falls into the former type of relying on abstract ideals over applied experience as the key to its conception of the functioning of the legal system. The systems which are understood to embrace the definition of civil laws are also related to each other in being commonly descended from the principles of Roman law, and in general have been found as working legal systems in such areas of the world as Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The concept of civil law was first promulgated during the long tenure enjoyed by the Roman Empire in governing much of the world. It is specifically “descended” from the Code of Justinian, a system of civil laws established by the Emperor of that name. Since that early point in the development of civil law, the ways in which civil laws have been modified have included the modifications made to it by the influence of political and religious institutions during the European Middle Ages, a period of time during which European nations developed their practices and institutions following the long influence of the Roman Empire. Though the actual substance of civil laws was often not a decisive influence on the implementation of legal practices in various areas of the empire, in which administrators tended to accede to local customs and rules in the larger interest of maintaining a sense of peace and civil order, the basic concept of civil law as implementing the existence of a defined body of civil laws tended to exercise an effect on countries which had at one point been tied to an informal system of culturally defined practices. Later widespread promulgations of a more advanced form of civil law often came about through similar methods based in the development of state power and of its imposition on other cultures, as can be seen in the case of a prominent source for civil laws, that of the Napoleonic Code, which distributed its system of civil laws through the European continent through the military campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte, and later of the ascension of Germany as a unified nation state and imperial power during the era of colonialist conquest.