In simple terms, civil law deals with disagreements and disputes between individuals, businesses, or other organizations, rather than crimes. It focuses on private rights and responsibilities, such as contracts, property, and family matters. Unlike criminal law, which involves the government prosecuting people for having committed a crime, civil law consists of one party suing another party to obtain compensation or the resolution of a dispute. In their strict and technical sense, the words civil law describe the law that refers to people, things and the relationships that develop between them, excluding not only criminal law but also commercial law, labor law, etc. Codification was carried out in most civil law countries, with the French Civil Code and the German BGB being the most influential civil codes.
Civil law is a legal system rooted in the Roman Empire and was codified and disseminated comprehensively starting in the 19th century, especially with the Napoleonic Code of France (180) and the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (1900) of Germany. Unlike common law systems, which rely heavily on judicial precedent, civil law systems are characterized by being based on legal codes that function as the primary source of law. Today, civil law is the most common legal system in the world and is practiced in some 150 countries. Civil law is the branch of law that covers private rights, rather than crimes. If your neighbor decides to sue you because your dog barks constantly, it's a matter of civil law.
Criminal laws are the rules that apply when someone commits a crime, such as assault, robbery, murder, arson, rape, and other types of crimes. Once a person is arrested and charged with a crime, that person goes to criminal court. Civil law concerns almost all other disputes. These are the rules that apply when a person sues another person, a company or agency.
This can include a housing case, such as eviction or foreclosure, a family case, such as divorce or custody, consumer problems, such as debt or bankruptcy, or when someone files a lawsuit for money due to property or personal damage. All of these cases go to civil court. Common law originated in medieval England. Today, common law is used in many countries that were formerly under English rule, including the United States. In the United States, Louisiana uses civil law, because Louisiana was colonized by the French, who developed Louisiana law based on French civil law.
There are regular, good-quality legal reports in France, but it's not a uniform practice in many of the existing civil law jurisdictions. We have also established a growing list of partner universities that guarantee LawShelf credit transfers, including Excelsior University, Thomas Edison State University, the University of Maryland Global Campus, Purdue Global University, and Southern New Hampshire University. Civil law, as a legal system, refers to a popular way of structuring legal systems around broad codes and detailed statutes that determine the rights and obligations of individuals, without stressing the role of precedents, courts, judges and juries, as in common law countries. However, these codes are not exhaustive, and since court decisions are a binding precedent in common law countries, there are many laws in the United States that are developed from court decisions, rather than legal codes.
Civil law contrasts primarily with English common law, which influenced the legal traditions of English-speaking countries. The difference between common law and civil law generally doesn't affect most Americans in their daily lives. A defendant in a civil case is found responsible or not for damages, while in a criminal case the defendant may or may not be found guilty. However, this code, and many of the codes that followed it, were primarily lists of civil and criminal offenses and their penalties.
Instead of being a compendium of laws or a catalog of case law, the code establishes general principles as rules legal. Most civil cases are tried in state courts and, if someone is convicted under civil law, they usually have to pay a fine. On the other hand, civil law refers to private disputes between individuals or between an individual and an organization or between organizations. In current practice, there are more and more precedents in civil law case law and they are usually found in the higher courts of many countries.
In the case of civil litigation, if the judge or jury believes that there is more than 50% of the evidence in favor of the plaintiffs, the plaintiffs win, which is very low compared to 99 per cent of the evidence presented in criminal law. In theory, the codes conceptualized in the civil law system should go beyond the compilation of discrete laws and, instead, establish the law in a coherent and comprehensive piece of legislation, sometimes introducing important reforms or starting over.
