Civil law

Civil law is a legal system that extensively codifies the laws of a particular entity and the exact manners in which justice is to be carried out against offenders. The legislators who compose the laws of civil-law systems determine what actions should be considered criminal and what penalties are appropriate for each crime. Civil law operates on thoroughly written legal codes that can be continually updated to allow for changing times and legal philosophies. It is the main legal system of most of modern mainland Europe.

What Is Civil Law?

Civil law encompasses three subsections of law, each of which manages a unique section of the legal process. Substantive law (which is a subset of due process) designates the activities that may be brought before a court as wrongdoing, whether criminal or civil. A criminal wrong is a violation of the laws of a legal entity, such as a state or country, and includes such actions as murder and burglary. Civil wrongs are noncriminal acts that infringe on the legal rights of others. They include matters such as conflicts over property, contracts, and wills. The substantive-law portion of civil law determines whether these or any other potentially wrongful actions will be brought to court.

The next section of civil law is procedural law (and procedural due process). This dictates the methods that courts should use to determine the outcomes of both criminal and civil cases. In civil law, judges bring charges against parties, personally investigate the issues at hand, and ultimately declare verdicts based on the established sets of codified laws.

Finally, penal law determines the types of punishments that should be assigned to convicted criminals. The nature of civil law entails that all three of these code categories be only generally described and vaguely detailed to allow for maximum adaptability in future legal proceedings. The civil-law tradition also requires that the codes be recorded clearly and simply so that all citizens may stay informed of their prescriptions.

In the twenty-first century, civil law is one of two primary legal systems used in most countries throughout the world. The other is common law, which features similar yet distinctly different legal practices. Unlike civil law, common law does not draw its authority from an exhaustive record of codified legal statutes but rather descends from precedent, or similar legal decisions of the past. Courts document these precedents so that all future legal cases may refer to them.

Another major difference between civil and common law is the role of judges. Common-law judges perform much less investigative work than civil-law judges. They instead serve as moderators or arbiters in court cases fought between two disputing entities. Juries, bodies of civilians with no professional legal backgrounds, then determine the appropriate outcome of a case based on the presented evidence from each side. Finally, the judges declare sentencing in strong accordance with the jury’s decision. In this way, judges who work within the common-law tradition contribute their own precedents to existing legal systems and are vital to forming their region’s overall legal landscape.

The History of Civil Law

Civil law originated in the ancient Roman laws known in Latin as ius civile. These laws that governed the entire body of Roman cives, or citizens, were mostly the same laws that are applied in civil law today. In the 500s C.E., the Roman emperor Justinian collected and codified the entirety of this Roman law, but the records were soon lost and remained so until the 1000s C.E. At that time, the collection resurfaced in Italy, where it became the foundational text for legal education. The rest of Europe soon learned of Justinian’s code and began recognizing its importance to Western legal philosophy. Juridical scholars respected both that the law had emerged from the great civilization of ancient Rome and that it provided exhaustive instructions for managing any type of legal occurrence.

Because of this, by the late Middle Ages, Justinian’s law had gained a supreme place of honor in universities across Europe. In the 1500s C.E., the codes were given the official Latin name Corpus Iurus Civilis. They continued to play an important role in the development of European legal systems into the early modern era.

At this time, jurists in numerous European countries began reorganizing their sets of national laws to combine unique local customs and laws with the prescriptions of Corpus Iurus Civilis to assemble superior codes of civil law tailored to their own countries. One notable fusion of this kind is the 1631 treatise Introduction to Dutch Jurisprudence by Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. Later, during the Enlightenment, various European countries issued comprehensive new legal codes that continued to rely on the principles of ancient Roman civil law. These included Austria’s Code of Joseph II in 1786, Prussia’s (Germany’s) Complete Territorial Code of 1794, and France’s Napoleonic Code of 1804. These codes form the foundations of the civil-law systems found in these same countries today.

Civil Law’s Continued Influence

Civil law did not take universal hold in Europe during the Middle Ages, however. Since the mid-1000s C.E., England had been operating under its own system of common law, some principles of which were made official with the passing of the Magna Carta in 1215. Later, when England took control of its colonies in North America, it passed its common-law tradition on to the American people.

The majority of the United States, from its founding, followed its English common-law heritage, but some remnants of civil law remained scattered throughout the country. In the early 1800s, founding father Thomas Jefferson lauded the civil-law philosophies of Justinian as vital to some recent American court decisions. The state of Louisiana is a notable example of civil law’s survival in America, as it mostly follows the civil-law traditions entrenched there since its years as a French possession. The same applies to some Southwestern states once owned by the Spanish Empire. While civil law is limited to these pockets of influence in the United States, it continues to thrive in Europe and much of the rest of the world.

Bibliography

"Key Features of Common Law or Civil Law Systems." The World BankPublic-Private Partnership in Infrastructure Resource Center, World Bank Group, 20 Jan. 2025, ppp.worldbank.org/public-private-partnership/legislation-regulation/framework-assessment/legal-systems/common-vs-civil-law#civil. Accessed 5 Feb. 2025. 

"The Myths and Reality of Common and Civil Law." Harvard Law Today, 5 Oct. 2022, hls.harvard.edu/today/the-myths-and-reality-of-common-and-civil-law/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2025.

Robbins Collection Research Center. "The Common Law and Civil Law Traditions." UC Berkeley Law, UC Regents, UC Berkeley School of Law, 2025, www.law.berkeley.edu/research/the-robbins-collection/exhibitions/common-law-civil-law-traditions/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2025.