How large is the difference in the amount of reading needed to become familiar with the law in common vs civil law countries? Common law relies more on previous rulings while civil law relies more on written code. Therefore, one would expect it takes more work to become familiar with the law in the former case. Please estimate: what is the difference in amount of work needed in these two systems to become familiar with an area of law? Please estimate for a well-educated person (with a college degree or higher) but is not a lawyer and does not plan to become one. For instance, suppose a person needs to learn about a specific crime (e.g. robbery). If she needs to read for X hours in a common law system and Y hours in a civil law system, please report your judgment on what is the ratio of X/Y. The answer clearly will depend on the specific area and the specific country. If possible, please compare countries with relatively well developed legal systems, such as U.S. vs France.
Legal Education Compared In the U.S., the customary way that one learns about the law for purposes of being admitted to practice as a lawyer is by completing three years of course (with no thesis or dissertation) at the graduate level, after completing a non-law related undergraduate degree (customarily four years but including non-legal studies), and then taking a several week bar exam preparation course and passing the bar exam. In many other common law countries, the customary way that one learns about the law for purposes of being admitted to practice as a lawyer is by completing a three or four year preprofessional undergraduate degree, with a primary concentration in law but also including other general education requirements, followed by preparation for and sitting for a bar exam, and sometimes a period of apprenticeship or internship. In most civil law countries, the customary way that one learns about the law for purposes of being admitted to practice as a lawyer is by completing a bachelor's level undergraduate degree which is taken by both people who want to become practicing lawyers and also by people who want to go into business with legal knowledge, followed by very extensive bar exam preparation in the context of an internship or apprenticeship somewhat similar to that of a U.K. barrister. This is complicated somewhat by the fact that the U.K. and most civil law countries have multiple different legal professionals rather than a unified legal profession like the U.S. The U.K. has barristers (trial advocates) who have more education through the &quot;inns of court&quot; and solicitors. Civil law systems typically have more kinds of legally trained professionals with legally trained notaries with transactional law practice infused with the keeping of public records, prosecutors, judges, trial advocates, sometimes specialist public law lawyers, and legally trained non-lawyers (typically in business) all belonging to separate professions with different roles in the legal system. No entry level lawyer who has been admitted to practice knows the whole of the law in the country where that student has studied, and generally, even very experienced lawyers will be experts in some parts of the law, and have only a vague notion of where to learn the law in other areas where the lawyer practices only infrequently or not at all. In common law countries, legal education focuses on &quot;edge cases&quot; and the way that edge cases are argued, and leaves instruction to many &quot;black letter&quot; rules of law to be learned in bar exam preparation and after entering the practice of law to learn on the job. In civil law countries, legal education focuses on providing students with a comprehensive outline of the &quot;black letter&quot; law rules of law in the area of private law and criminal law and a few bits of public law, and learning methods of argument, advocacy and edge cases is reserved for learning on the job in practice. In both systems, the primary way that one learns the law as a future lawyer in the first instance is from textbooks, rather than primary authorities, although common law country law school textbooks have a heavier mix of excerpts from court cases selected by a professor, while civil law country law school textbooks have a heavier mix of statutory language excerpts and exposition form the professor writing the textbook. Lay Understanding Of Particular Areas Of Law Please estimate: what is the difference in amount of work needed in these two systems to become familiar with an area of law? Please estimate for a well-educated person (with a college degree or higher) but is not a lawyer and does not plan to become one. A well-educated person with a college degree or higher but is not a lawyer and does not plan to become one faces a very steep learning curve in either system to become familiar at a functional level with an area of law. Most of what a lawyer learns in school is the larger context and method of analysis, research skills and an ability to identify legal issues. In common law countries, a lot of this is learning how the case law making system works and having an unwritten outline of key issues in areas of law that would be codified in civil law countries. In civil law countries, a lot of this is learning how general parts of civil law codes interact with more specific provisions, and being aware of the &quot;gloss of interpretation&quot; (often in scholarly work by law professors) that is given to a superficially very vague and short provision like the section of a civil code imposing tort liability, and also how to research legal issues in that system. You really need to know all of this general material to have a competent and comprehensive understanding of specific legal issues, whether you have one that you are investigating or twenty. So, it is extremely inefficient for a non-lawyer to master a single legal issue. The difference in the learning curve between civil law systems and common law systems from pure primary sources is greatly reduced because both are intermediated by secondary sources that explain them in a more efficient and pedagogically sound manner. Rather than largely being a difference between say, the French system and the Colorado system, for example, the biggest difference in the learning curve involved the nature of the particular legal issue that you want to know about within a particular system. For example, in both the U.S. and in France, the body of law that governs child custody and child support is very self-contained. If you master the legal principles and authorities in that area of law, you can fairly swiftly know all of the substantive law issues and research issues involved. On the other hand, in both the U.S. and in France, the body of law that governs a property division in a divorce is absolutely sprawling. This is not because the law of property division itself, in sensu stricto, is terribly vast, but because applying the relatively simple law of property division to any set of facts, presupposes and requires a comprehensive knowledge of the private laws of property, contracts and other legal obligations, and associated tax laws, which can be quite vast over the full range of legal and property rights the might need to be divided in some divorce, sometime. It is the opposite of being self-contained. Similarly, immigration law or patent law questions can often be resolved and understood almost entirely within the four corners of a small number of statutes and regulations, while tax law questions, like property divisions in divorces, interface with a vast expanse of property, contract and legal obligations that might arise. As a general rule, laws pertaining to personal status tend to be self-contained, while laws in areas implicated property ownership and legal rights more generally, tend to require an expansive knowledge of many areas of law. Starting From Scratch While codification v. case law doesn't make much of a difference in the amount of work needed to become a lawyer or to understand a particular legal issue, codification does provide a decisive advantage in the case of a country seeking to adopt a new legal system from scratch, and many former European colonies have done, which is why civil law systems are so much more common globally. From the perspective of a legislature and judiciary starting from a more or less clean slate, it is much easier to adopt a mildly edited set of civil codes as the starting point for the law of your country, than it is to incorporate centuries of case law from some other country into the law in a country that has never used a common law system case law system &quot;organically&quot; prior to adopting its own set of laws. Even then, it is much harder for legislators to be clear on precisely what laws it is that they are adopting at the outset in a common law case law based system where many legal rules are implicit in decisions that are only imperfectly indexed, rather than explicitly codified. And, from a legislator's perspective, adopting a comprehensive new legal system without any clear delineation of what laws you are actually adopting in your new country, is very undesirable, unless you are merely grafting onto a common law legal system that has already long been in force in your country prior to starting its new legal system, with which all prospective legal practitioners in your country are already intimately familiar.
Different jurisdictions have different attitudes and histories. The difference is probably more cultural than legal and both leases are quite likely legal in both jurisdictions. In general, US jurisdictions tend towards laissez-faire capitalism and contracts have a buyer beware slant. Civil-law European countries are much more collective and have very strong consumer protection. Canada and other Commonwealth countries fall somewhere in the middle.
Yes it affects them. Judges are pursuing their vocation as a career and there are career paths within the judicial system just as there are in every other career. Screw up too many times and your career ends at your present level. Judges are also professionals and most take professional pride in doing their jobs well. Having a decision overturned is professionally embarrassing. As a matter of public policy, there is no sanction that is directly applied to the judge otherwise judges would be too cautious to make decisions. Anyone who makes professional decisions will get them wrong from time to time - they generally are not punished. That said there are judicial errors that stem from making the wrong judgement (so to say) call and judicial errors that stem from royally screwing up. The former are far less damaging than the latter. For an example of the former, a judge is applying a relatively new statute for which there have been no other decisions and interprets the legislation in a reasonable way but one the appeal court disagrees with. For an example of the latter, deciding the matter on a basis which neither party put before the court and which the judge did not draw to the parties attention during the trial - as a common law country, the New Zealand legal system is adversarial: the court exists to decide the dispute between the parties on the basis the parties argue, not to go on a "frolic of its own". In addition, appeal courts can only overrule a decision if the judge has made an error of law, not if they have made an error of fact. A judge is allowed to be wrong about the facts but not about the law. In practice, the distinction is not trivial. In a jury trial, the jury decides the facts, the judge decides the law - appeals can only be on the basis of what the judge did, not on the basis of what the jury did (barring egregious misconduct by the jury). In a judge only trial the judge decides both but an appeal can only be on matters of law.
This appears to be a complaint about lawyers using the legal process to achieve what their client wants. Forgive me, but this seems to be like complaining that doctors only want to cure the client's disease, architects only want to design the client's buildings and generals only want to kill the client's enemies. Your lawyer is not your business strategist or your life coach! A civil case is always about the money. If you are pursuing a civil case over a principle then you are going to spend a lot of money and probably lose. The use of a lawyer should always be part of your wider negotiation strategy in the same way that your armed forces are part of your diplomacy; in both cases the threat of use is usually better than the actual use. A civil case always follows a failure to successfully negotiate. Not all by any means, but most, civil cases would be better settled by agreement than litigation by all parties. If you believe that your objectives can best be served by a social media campaign, political pressure, etc. then go for it. Your lawyer can advise you what the risks are wrt to defamation etc. but ultimately how you choose to pursue your goal is up to you. Lawyers, understandably, look for legal solutions. A public relations professional is far better placed than a lawyer to inform your media strategy.
If you want to study the basics of law, where should you start? Don't try memorizing individual laws. That would be a waste of energy, in part because --as you rightly point out-- laws change. There are many introductory books. Law 101, by Jay M. Feinman, is an excellent starting point. The next step --broadly speaking-- consists of reading court decisions (aka court opinions). Opinions released by upper (aka reviewing) courts are available online for free. If you are interested in jurisdictions in the US, Leagle.com is one of many very good resources; EU cases are available here; and so forth. Acquainting yourself with court opinions is quite beneficial. First, court opinions [collaterally] teach how to formulate one's legal positions. Rather than merely being formulaic and a copycat, a litigant is to convey that his legal position is more consistent (compared to the adversary) with the laws and underlying doctrines. His points are easier to get across by adapting his presentation thereof to how courts are used to handle the legal principles involved. Second, court opinions identify the statutes that are relevant to the type of disputes that arise between parties. This is indicative of importance that a statute or procedural rule entails in relation to other laws. Third, court opinions reflect how statutes, rules, and doctrines are interpreted. Oftentimes the way how legislation is worded leads &quot;laypeople&quot; to have misconceptions on the interpretation of laws and rules, when in reality these are construed usually in a much narrower way. Law journals are a good source once you have gained some background in law and are interested in a sort of monograph about a topic that is new to you. But, as explained above, court opinions also serve that purpose (perhaps less scholarly). Having a legal dictionary is always a good idea. Courts in the US oftentimes quote definitions from Black's Law Dictionary for crucial terms which statutory law does not define. What is most applicable to real life? Without knowing whether you are interested in a particular field, it is safe to say that contract law is the most applicable. Entering contracts is part of our everyday life even if laypeople don't notice it when they purchase goods &amp; services, reach an agreement, or engage in a course of conduct which reasonably fosters expectations. And good news is that the principles of contract law are largely similar among modern jurisdictions, including the America (the continent, not just the USA), many member states of the EU, and Asian countries. The Restatement (Second) of Contracts is a very useful formulation of contract law. Courts in the US very often cite the Restatement for premising their decisions on contract disputes. In countries with a civil law system, the principles of contract law are usually formulated in one or multiple sections of the [countries'] Civil Code. Procedural law (aka rules of criminal or civil procedure) is also highly applicable: Large portions thereof apply to all disputes which are brought to court. To a great extent these rules are very similar across the jurisdictions of one same country, but the litigant ought too ensure his compliance with the rules lest he loses the case for a technicality. Lastly, procedural law can be remarkably boring unless the person anticipates he will be involved in litigation.
When? There are basically several times to look at when you want to look at the text, and then in what language. The Codex Iustinianus itself is part of the Corpus iuris civilis and contained only laws given by the previous emperors, while other older laws were in the Digesta/Pandecta and the Novellae contained any new imperial laws after 534. The whole CICiv, was given an introductory text right from inception: When it was compiled, back around 528, one of the books of the CICiv was the Institutiones Iustiniani, which was the prescribed legal education basis - the study book for the aspiring lawyers of his time. It contained how to practice law and cases that were to be discussed. On this basis, a glossa marginalis commentary has survived in Turin, which was made from a copy of the Institutiones. The commentary is dated to be contemporary to the CICiv and was made by adding comments around the real text, making researchers believe this was a work by a teacher, so he could answer or explain parts of the text, or reference earlier parts of the book easier. Around the 7th century, the Pandekta/Digesta were pretty much forgotten in big parts. In the middle ages, it took about till late 1000s, early 1100s, to re-compile the CICiv, when Irnerius of Bologna did manage to collect a sizeable portion of it by rediscovering the Littera Florentina and added to this collection by referencing earlier glossae. The Florentina alone is more than 900 pages long, and his littera vulgata/bologniensis (a german edition's Bibliography an Italian edition's bibliography), a new commentary on the re-compiled laws, including large parts of the Digesta. This book became the new introduction and teaching text about the CICiv and leading teaching bok for all lawyers in Europe at that time. This text is, what defined the roman tradition of law In the 19th century, legal scholars that studied a lot of the CICiv and argued along those lines - a style predominantly Existant in Germany - were known as Pandectists. One of the more central books of them was the Lehrbuch der Pandeketen by Karl Ludwig Arndts von Arnesberg (Stuttgart 1877). The praxis that developed in these circles greatly did influence the style of how the German Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch BGB was organized and written, and this systematic was exported. Later, books such as Paul Koschaker: Europa und das römische Recht (4th edition Munich 1966) did recept the whole roman legal body, giving the CiCiv a very thorough look, and how it influenced the modern Code Civil and Germanic tradition of law, while Franz Wieacker: Privatrechtsgeschichte der Neuzeit unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der deutschen Entwicklung (2nd Edition, Göttingen 1967) did look at the Pandectists and how they were influenced by the CICiv. As more scholarly works I want to point to three that were referenced in the notes of the page when my ancient history Professor mentioned Roman Law being &quot;verklauselt, kompliziert und voller sonderfälle&quot; (~complicated and with many exceptions) in passing. A Short History of Roman Law by Olga Tellegen-Couperus (1993) does spare the last 8 pages on the CiCiv. The more thorough Herbert Felix Jolowicz; Barry Nicholas: Historical Introduction to the Study of Roman Law (Cambridge 1967) does spare the last chapters on the CICiv. Adolf Berger, Adolf: Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (The American Journal of Philology 1953) is taken still one of the main shorthands and (sometimes outdated) bibliographies under historians. Large parts of the Latin CICiv (as #12) can be accessed in &quot;the Roman Law Library&quot; by the Grenoble University, together with edition scans.
The main impediment is identifying exactly what "a law" is. When people talk (casually) about "the law", that can refer to statutes enacted by Congress, regulations set forth by administrative agencies to articulate specifics of those statutes, and Supreme Court rulings as to what "the law" is or says. The canonical example of "a law" is a statute passed by Congress. Under that understanding, you could point to the US Code and ask the question "how many", though you may have to also subtract things ruled unconstitutional by SCOTUS (they aren't removed from The Code, unless actually repealed by Congress). In the US code, there isn't an enumerable element "a law". Title 17 pertains to copyright; Title 18 pertains to crime. There isn't just one law about crime and one law about copyright. There are 12 chapters in Title 17; Chapter 1 has a couple dozen sections. Sections can get fairly minutely subdivided: there is no clear point at which you can say "this is one law, this is another". However, it is legally irrelevant how many there are – unless Congress passes a law that counts likes ("must repeal two laws for every new one passed"). The immediate product of congressional enactments is the US Code; the immediate product of administrative rule-making is the Code of Federal Regulations. Supreme Court decisions are also published in United States Reports, though I don't if there is an exhaustive online compendium of all rulings. Also note that things passed by Congress are "Laws" (some public, some private). Things in the US Code originate in such acts of Congree, but not every act of Congress affects the US Code, for example PL 118-81. When new subject matter is first introduced it is usually entirely contained in the corresponding law passed, but subsequently it can be amended, and an amendment to copyright law could be snuck into a bill generally about terrorism. I think that the stuff in the US Code corresponds to what most people think "a law" is, but it's better to look at the US Code as a single thing – "the law" – rather than try to count individual laws. If you are armed with access to all of these resources, you would also need to know where to find relevant law. Once you find all of the applicable text, you simply apply general legal principles to reach a conclusion, then hire a lawyer to determine where you went wrong, then hire another lawyer to determine where he went wrong. At least in difficult cases. Fortunately, although enacted bills often glue stuff together in crazy ways, when it is assembled into the US Code, it is organized more sensibly. Still, not all crimes are defined in title 18 (there 1re 52 other titles to search to find crimes).
The core principle of stare decisis is that the law should not depend on what judge you got; two cases with the same facts should have the same outcome. In the common-law tradition, there weren't really written statutes; there was only "what's been done in the past," and so the only reference you'd have to what the law should be in some situation is past court decisions. If judges didn't have some constraints to rule similarly to before, there really wouldn't be any legal standards (because there was no written law to go back to; in civil-law countries, there always has been a written law, so precedent isn't so important). Stare decisis doesn't actually directly stop a judge from entering a decision that goes against binding precedent. However, judges are expected to obey precedent, and for the most part do what they're supposed to do. If they don't, the case will likely be reversed on appeal. Binding precedent only applies within the area a court serves; a court doesn't have to listen to precedent from a different court that has nothing to do with the case. The rule is that precedent from any court up the appeals chain is binding; federal district courts are bound by their circuit court and SCOTUS, state courts are bound by higher state courts and SCOTUS (but not other federal courts, as the case can't be appealed to them). A court can sometimes overrule its own precedent, but the cases where it can do that are rare (and so applying a higher court's precedent can also be viewed as "if you appeal to them they'll say X, so we're saying X.")