Romano-Germanic Legal System - LAW 250

The Romano-Germanic Legal System (Civil Law or Civilian Law) is a legal system originating in Europe, intellectualized within the framework of late Roman law, and whose most prevalent feature is that its core principles are codified into a referable system, which serves as the primary source of law. This can be contrasted with Common Law Systems whose intellectual framework comes from judge-made decisional law, which gives precedential authority to prior court decisions on the principle that it is unfair to treat similar facts differently on different occasions (i.e. doctrine of judicial precedent). Historically, the Romano-Germanic legal system is the group of legal ideas and systems ultimately derived from the Code of Justinian, but heavily overlaid by Germanic, Canonical, Feudal, and Local Practices, as well as doctrinal strains such as natural laws, codification, and legislative positivism. Conceptually, the Romano-Germanic legal system proceeds from abstractions, formulates general principles, and distinguishes substantive rules from procedural rules. It holds case law to be secondary and subordinate to statutory law. The marked feature of the Romano-Germanic Systems is that they use Codes with brief text that tends to avoid factually specific scenarios. Code articles deal in generalities and thus stand at odds with statutory schemes which are often very long and very detailed. The Romano-Germanic Legal System is the most widespread system of law in the world, in force in various forms in about 150 countries.

Language of Instruction: English (legal terms, however, are also given in Arabic and French).