civil law

overview

The civil law system is often contrasted with the common law system, which originated in medieval England, whose intellectual framework historically came from uncodified judge-made and gives precedential authority to prior court decisions. Historically, a civil law is the group of legal ideas and systems ultimately derived from the Corpus juris civilis, but heavily overlain as well as doctrinal strains such as natural law, codification and legal positivism. Conceptually, civil law proceeds from abstractions, formulates general principles and distinguishes substrantive rules from procedural rules. Civil law is often paired with the inquisitorial system but the terms are not synonymous.