Why is it called Civil Law? What&#39;s &quot;civil&quot; about it? Why is a civil legal system referred to as a system of “civil” law? In what sense is it “civil”? Does the name derive from origins in or association with the civil code or code civil? In this case, what was “civil” about the civil code? Was it distinct from a separate criminal code?
Civil comes ultimately from civis, meaning citizen, but its roots lie in (reconstructed) proto-Italic *keiwis, meaning &quot;society,&quot; coming from the Indo-European *ḱey, meaning &quot;to settle.&quot; The obvious semantic connection is through the concept of a settlement, a village or town (indeed, by Latin times, civitas, &quot;city&quot;). Civil codes themselves are concerned with the orderly operation of society, defining and governing relationships that people have with each other and with the state. It is therefore not difficult to see how this relates to both senses for which the civ- root has been used, denoting both social constructs that bind people together as well as the people so bound. The people who came up with the name &quot;code civil&quot; did not likely have all of this etymological history in mind; but I would add to Dale M's correct assertion &quot;civil means of the citizen&quot; that it also means of society.
&quot;Codes&quot; are usually collections of previously existing laws. The Code of Hammurabi and the Code of Justinian were both collections of laws, gathered for easy reference. In the US, the US Code (USC) is an almost comprehensive collection of current law, much of which was passed in separate statutes before it was codified. In this contest, to codify is to include a law in the code, altering formatting and numbering to make it consistent with the rest of the code. Laws in the US are normally passed and go into effect before they are codified. In modern usage &quot;code&quot; is not normally used for a single law. There is also the US Code of Federal Regulations or CFR which is a collection of regulations passed by various federal agencies to implement law. They are not laws, but in many respects thy have the force of law. I believe that several other legal systems use &quot;code&quot; or a word that might be translated as &quot;code&quot; in a similar way. In a wider sense, &quot;code&quot; can be used to refer to an entire system of law, as &quot;the Mosaic code&quot; or &quot;the Anglo-American code&quot;. It can also be used for the precepts of a non-legsal system as &quot;an ethical code&quot; or &quot;the architect's code of practice&quot;. A bill is a proposed law not yet passed by a legislature. In modern US usage, codes only include statutes passed by legislatures, not constitutions. This is because codes collect the work of legislatures, but written constitutions come from different and special sources. The term &quot;act&quot;, in modern usage, is a synonym for &quot;statute&quot;. In historic usage not all acts were statutes, only those important enough to be routinely quoted verbatim, not paraphrased.
The naming conventions for legislation in the United States and the United Kingdom have evolved over time and have undergone various changes and adaptations. It is difficult to pinpoint a specific time when the naming conventions for legislation in the two countries diverged, as the process has likely been a gradual one. In general, the United States and the United Kingdom both have a long history of using names or titles to identify and refer to legislation. In the United States, legislation is typically given a short and descriptive title, such as the &quot;Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act&quot; or the &quot;Sarbanes-Oxley Act.&quot; In the United Kingdom, legislation is often referred to by its short title, which may include the year in which it was enacted, such as the &quot;Companies Act 2006&quot; or the &quot;Bribery Act 2010.&quot; These naming conventions have evolved over time and have been influenced by a variety of factors, including changes in the political and legal systems of the two countries. It is likely that the naming conventions for legislation in the United States and the United Kingdom will continue to evolve and change in the future.
Organically rather than by design, laws and courts preceded the theoretical constitutional basis. Kings developed a practice of legislating in council, rather than solo, meaning that their edicts went out not as &quot;the King decrees XYZ&quot; but &quot;the King, with the assent of the archbishops, bishops, abbots, barons, etc., decrees XYZ&quot;. This eventually became the Parliamentary system, wherein only Parliament could make laws (especially about raising taxes) and the King alone could not. Because of the gradual evolution, it's not easy to point to the first such statute or even the first proper &quot;Parliament&quot;. The form was not settled. Nowadays we expect Acts to start with a set &quot;enacting formula&quot;, to be published in a set way, and to be called &quot;Acts&quot; at all. Earlier laws lacked these elements. It was common for Parliaments to transact a variety of business, such as appointing officials or distributing money, without strictly distinguishing a category of what we would now call a &quot;public general Act&quot;, something setting out broadly applicable rules under the tenor of law. To take an early example, the Domesday Book was undoubtedly commissioned by William I in council in 1085, but we could argue for a long time whether that really counted as a law made by the King alone or through a proto-parliamentary approach. The Assize of Clarendon in 1166 is closer - we have the text and it refers to the counsel of all the barons - but still not obviously &quot;an Act&quot;. Magna Carta came in 1215 and was repeatedly confirmed by successive monarchs in slight variations; only the 1297 version is currently deemed to be an Act still partially in force. At the same time as this legislative activity, a bewildering array of courts applied essentially customary law for local cases. If you commit a murder in Durham in 1300 and would like to not be executed, then you would be appealing (I think?) to the mercy of the Prince-Bishop in his own court. A few dozen miles away and the process and authority was different. Things gradually became more uniform and systematized, and by the sixteenth century there was enough critical mass of legal philosophy to try to &quot;explain&quot; the legal system more formally and in recognizably modern terms. We may as well take Edward Coke's Institutes of the Laws of England (1628-1644) as a turning point: four volumes setting out a comprehensive view of what English law was all about. In contrast, take Bracton's similar work of 1235, which was the first real analysis of case law in England. Bracton was writing in a context without a general idea of precedent, and where the binding extent of Roman civil law was not clear. By Coke's time that was well established. But they are both trying to make sense of the law as they found it: giving explanations for the data, if you like. (A parallel course was taking place in Scotland with its institutional writers, although they ended up with a different system from England's. They were equally trying to explain what they saw.) Some of the early modern authors contributed to figuring out which decisions of past Parliaments or councils should be taken to be Acts, as such. Coke, in particular, also set out the criterion that an Act should purport to have been made by all three of the King, Lords and Commons. Our modern consolidated versions of the statute book derive from this time, and on legislation.gov.uk you can see the oldest Act still in force, The Statute of Marlborough 1267. That's different from the oldest Acts ever made, as discussed above, a more slippery concept. Ideas such as the separation of powers are reverse-engineered in this way. Indeed, it's not obvious that Britain has that separation. It may not be the right way to understand the governmental and legal order that has developed. John Locke might have thought it would be a good idea, but Walter Bagehot denied it was a useful frame for analyzing the interrelationships of various public bodies.
There are laws against animal cruelty What counts as cruel is a social convention that changes over time. It is a fundamental principle of common law jurisdictions (like most of the united-states) that courts have the power to interpret (and re-interpret) the law so that as society’s standards change, so does the law.
What is the equivalent for “Consideration” (English common law) in Spanish speaking countries? Prestación. Perhaps not all Spanish speaking countries adopt a one-word term, but the notion of consideration definitely exists in civil law. It is quite mistaken to presume that the concept is unique to common law systems. The Civil Code of both Spain (see art. 1257) and México (art. 1793) are in terms of "transmission or transfer of rights", which fits the meaning of consideration. The Civil Code of Spain in its art. 1254 refers to "[consent] to give something or perform [prestar] a service" (brackets added for clarity), whence the term prestación qualifies as consideration in several --if not all-- types of contract. In fact, article 1274 literally mentions "prestación or promise".
Its worth actually reading through the law again - they're meant for different categories of drugs - and its worth looking up the relevant laws as a whole. You can't cherrypick which law you charge them under in this case. It depends on what the suspect has in posession, and if you have more serious charges, they're probably going to be preferred unless the prosecution decides to throw the entire library at the suspect and charge them with everything they can, or a larger subset. A quick search on the internet - which shouldn't be taken as legal advice, brings up this link. Category 1 drugs are addictive and seen as therapeutically useless - you shouldn't have any realistic reason to have quantities of it in your posession. Category 3 is drugs with therapeutic use - stuff like codine. You could get a prescription for that, but there's potential for abuse. They're aimed at different classes of drugs - and the confusion is over a misinterpretation of what the law is about. As an aside, this is why you need to usually read more than just a specific statute or law to get what its about.
This is a purely linguistic question, despite the hope to discover a special legal process. Somebody uses a word or phrase in order to communicate an specific idea. Somebody else thinks &quot;That's a good way to put it&quot; and uses the same or very similar expression to convey that idea. Enough people do this and it becomes &quot;conventional&quot;. The word itself is not made up, it already existed, and was simply applied in a specialized way (e.g. &quot;tort&quot; is an ordinary French word meaning &quot;wrong, mistake&quot; taken into English in a more specialized manner). If you want to know the history of a legal term, you have to read relevant historical rulings to see when the word was first used. That is how we know that current technical term &quot;consideration&quot; derives, from around the time of Henry VIII, that it derives from rulings referring to &quot;assumpsits&quot; which were made &quot;in consideration of&quot; an obligation. &quot;Trover&quot; is a sufficiently old term in law that you will have a hard time pinning down first use and the pattern of expansion.