Is there any (which?) English speaking jurisdiction that uses a civil (continental) law system? I am trying to develop an artificial legal reasoning system. I am using the English language for it, but I want/need to develop it (firsthand) for the civil/continental law system, not for the common law / Anglo-Saxon law system. But currently it seems impossible to do this, because I don't know any English-speaking jurisdiction that uses a civil law system. Is there any such jurisdiction/country? Maybe a very small one, but still with its corpus of law and with some amount of case law (court decisions)?
Because of its French roots, Louisiana uses civil law.
Is there a way to be legally represented in the UK without being a resident? Pretty much anyone, anywhere in the world, who can afford to hire a lawyer can be legally represented in the U.K. without being a resident. In order to seek most kinds of affirmative relief (other than disputing the jurisdiction of a particular court over a particular party in a particular case in the first instance), however, the non-resident must acknowledge (at least conditionally subject to a right to appeal a resolution of a jurisdictional issue), the jurisdiction of the court over the non-resident and submit to that court's jurisdiction. In one famous recent example, the King of Dubai, Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who is obviously not a British resident, hired a British lawyer to represent him in a custody dispute with his then-wife Princess Haya, concerning the couple's two children. After two years of litigation, a British senior family court judge, Andrew McFarlane, ruled against him and granted sole custody to his wife in this case on March 24, 2022. And if yes, who is a reputable firm which can deal with banking related issues. Law.StackExchange is not an appropriate place to ask for recommendations to specific law firms or lawyers. More generally, however, the financial industry in the U.K., including its banking industry, is highly geographically concentrated in a financial district in London called the City of London (just &quot;the City&quot; to insiders) which has its own mayor and governing body called City of London Corporation. As a result, most legal professionals (barristers and solicitors alike) with specialized expertise in banking law in the U.K. have offices in or near this financial district.
Civil law instead of criminal law Not all things that we commonly refer to as "illegal" are actually crimes - many of them refer to violations of contracts or other obligations where the harmed party may (or may not) use the civil system to obtain some satisfaction, but the government and prosecutors will not do it for them. In general (with some exceptions, depends on jurisdiction and circumstances), most low scale copyright violations are treated as a civil matter - it allows the harmed party (i.e. the copyright owner) to sue you for damages in a civil court, if they wish and are able to do so. However, it generally is not a crime (again, with some exceptions - e.g. large scale distribution often is) so the government and police on their own cannot, should not and does not investigate and prosecute violations of software licence terms.
This article may be helpful. The development of a distinct, lower standard of proof for civil cases comes after the US came into existence, thus the expressions were developed independently, after the doctrine itself started to develop. Various expressions are used, often with different implications that could lead to fixing a specific expression to a definite doctrine, for instance &quot;greater weight of the evidence&quot;, &quot;more likely than not&quot; as well as the contender expressions. Earliest expressions of the principle in question include Edward Wynne Eunomus (1768) Wherever a verdict is given, the Plaintiff at least must give evidence to maintain his Declaration: where evidence is produced on both sides, the verdict is given for the Plaintiff or Defendant, according to the superior weight of evidence. Richards Wooddeson's 1777 formulation is In causes concerning civil rights and property, that side must prevail, in favor of which probability preponderates: but the (a) humanity of our law never esteems the turn of the balance sufficient to convict a man of any, especially a capital, crime. For it requires a very strong and irrefragable presumption of guilt to justify the infliction of the severer human punishments In Delaware (1801) in the case State v. Crocker, 2 Del. Cas. 150, the doctrine is &quot;named&quot;, preponderance of evidence: In civil cases a preponderance of evidence is sufficient for you to convict; in criminal, you should have proof You can find &quot;balance of probabilities&quot; in a UK case Head v. Head (1823). The origin of the construction &quot;balance of probabilities&quot; is philosophy and theology, whereas &quot;preponderance of evidence&quot; is a more-distinctly legal expression. Since the underlying ideas were developed separately in the US and England, it is not surprising that different expressions were attached to the doctrine.
Does the High Court of Justice of England and Wales (Queen's Bench Division) ever exercise original criminal jurisdiction in serious cases (eg, a terrorism trial) in modern times? Has it ever exercised such jurisdiction since its creation by the Judicature Acts? No, with the exception of criminal contempt of court proceedings (which arguably don't constitute &quot;serious cases&quot;). Prior to the Constitutional Reform Act of 2005, the Lord Chief Justice of the High Court was &quot;President of the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal and Head of Criminal Justice, meaning its technical processes within the legal domain,&quot; but these duties were appellate and administrative in nature, rather than involving original jurisdiction, and under the 2005 Act the Lord Chief Justice can appoint another judge to these positions. England's criminal courts and civil courts were already almost completely separated before the modern &quot;High Court of Justice was established in 1875 by the Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1873.&quot; The High Court is a direct successor to courts dating all of the way back to the 1200s, some of which had original criminal jurisdiction, but those predate the Judicature Act cutoff of the question. Caveats This said, English legal history is not a model of strict consistency, and I wouldn't be stunned to discover some random one-off original jurisdiction criminal trials in the late 1800s or early 1900s under statutes that have now been long since repealed that attracted little notice and have little or no modern legal importance. But, I have no actual knowledge of any such exceptions. For example, while the Admiralty Division of the High Court is now exclusively civil, I wouldn't be stunned to discover that the Admiralty Division at some point long ago, but after 1875, might have had original criminal jurisdiction over crimes committed on the high seas, like piracy and mutiny, even though it no longer has such jurisdiction. England's Admiralty Courts historically had this jurisdiction, and England's Admiralty Courts were consolidated into the High Court in 1875. But it isn't easy to discern from the resources available to me precisely when authority for crimes committed on the high seas was transferred from England's Admiralty Court to the Crown Courts (which have jurisdiction over these cases now). Similarly, while debtor's prison was abolished in England in 1869, a few years before the High Court was created, I wouldn't be shocked to find that the Queen's Bench division may have handled some residual original jurisdiction cases related to quasi-criminal body executions for non-payment of debts originally resulting in incarceration in debtor's prisons, in cases originally arising prior to 1869 that weren't fully wrapped up in 1875. Footnote Some countries with common law legal systems and a court system based upon the English model have courts called a &quot;High Court&quot; which consolidate the functions of the English &quot;High Court&quot; and the English &quot;Crown Court&quot; (which handles trials in serious criminal cases) in a single court. This is frequently motivated by a shortage of judges with the exceptional legal competence necessary to inspire confidence in the conduct of such proceedings. In U.S. practice, for example, it is the rule and not the exception, for felony criminal cases, civil cases arising in equity, serious civil cases arising at law, and both criminal and civil appeals from lower courts to all be handled by the same court of general jurisdiction (although the terminology, of course, is usually slightly different since the U.S. does not have, and has never had after 1776, a King, a Queen, or Lords, as a matter of constitutional law).
The general rule is, anything is allowed unless it is forbidden (and not that you can only do things that are expressly permitted). The logical structure of law may be a bit more challenging than procedural programming logic, since it may require a global knowledge and evaluation of the entire code (typically but not absolutely, the scope of the search for "unless otherwise" conditions is restricted to "in this chapter"). In other words, the law is a set of propositions which must all be true, and unlike actual execution of instructions in a sequence, law is to be interpreted simultaneously but hierarchically (that is: the order in which clauses are written is not significant). The appearance that the law is self-contradictory is largely illusory, though the resolution of the conflict may require a careful reading of the law and knowledge of jurisdictional hierarchy (federal law is superior to state law, which entails a particular resolution of the apparent conflict). Sometimes there are real conflicts, which usually result from using words in conflicting ways (note the practice of re-defining words "in this chapter/section/title"). The reason why law is not a science is that law is normative, not descriptive: it dictates what is allowed (a determination made through the political process), and does not attempt to discover what independently is. The reason why the legal process cannot be implemented in software is that software does not yet correctly interpret natural language, and law is written in natural language following interpretations based on judgments of what choices a reasonable would make. Perhaps if you propose a piece of law that you think is contradictory, it would be possible to show how the contradiction is illusory.
The postpositive adjectives in many legal noun phrases in English—attorney general, fee simple—are a heritage from Law French. Source See also the Norman Conquest of England And also see section 69 SOCPA2005, specifically at s.69(3)(a) and s.69(4)(a), for the use of &quot;body corporate&quot; in england-and-wales legislation.
If you say something twice, eventually they’ll be in conflict Law codes are vast. They deal with many things and sometimes, as here, they deal with the same thing twice. If they duplicated themselves, rather than cross-referencing, every time the law was changed, every single instance would have to be tracked down and changed. Admittedly, that is not as big a problem with digital codes (but still not infallible and definitely time-consuming) but when these would have to be found by hand, it was damn near impossible. Written this way, change it once and it’s changed everywhere. My first boss taught me that. The fired was engineering rather than law but the principle is the same.