What is Jurisprudence? I am a Law Student in Greece trying to understand what Law is a what Jurisprudence is and what the jurisprudential method of thinking is. What is Jurisprudence; what is its object of study, what are we analysing? Many people say that Jurisprudence is not the same as Law. Law is the system (not the agreggation of rules but the mental abstraction, their method) of rules and Jurisprudence is the analysis, the study. Analysis is the syllogistic method with which the individual elements of a phenomenon or a mental abstraction are isolated, to be studied separetely and interpreted. Study is the mental work, especially meticulous and systematic reading, with the aim of understanding or interpreting a determined object. Object is anything that is related to something else mainly as its cause or aim. Is Jurisprudence the study or the analysis of Law's interpretation (Law's interpretation being the aim of Jurisprudence)? How can we study and interpret a mental abstraction?
Legal Theory and Philosophy of Law There are two different meanings of the word Jurisprudence A heavy word for the study or knowledge of the law. If a judge or law lecturer were to refer to &quot;the role of freedom of contract in our jurisprudence&quot; for example, this is the sense intended (this is the sense @ohwilleke refers to in his answer). The second meaning - and the more usual meaning nowadays, particularly in in academic circles (I note you are studying law so this is probably the meaning you are asking about) - could be described as the philosophy of law. In Legal Philosophies (1997) J W Harris says (p.1) Jurisprudence is a ragbag. Into it are cast all kinds of general speculations about the law. What is it for? What does it achieve? Should we value it? How is it to be improved? Is it dispensable? Who makes it? Where do we find it? What is its relation to morality, to justice, to politics, to social practices, or to naked force? Should we obey it? Whom does it serve? These are the questions of which general jurisprudence is comprised. They can be ignored, but they will no go away... Jurisprudence has to entrench on [the disciplines of moral and political philosophers] at many points, as well as upon those of social and political theory. It is a scavenger, as well as a ragbag; having no perimeter to its field of enquiry, save that what is studied must have a bearing on some general speculation about law. If jurisprudence has a heartland all its own, it is legal theory Much discussion about moral claims of the law (and moral claims on the law) takes the concept of law itself for granted. Yet, answers to such questions may turn on what picture of law we have. Legal theory asks: What is the nature of law (everywhere, or just in the modern state)? In a three year English undergraduate law degree, Jurisprudence has traditionally been studied as a compulsory module in the third year which concentrates on legal theory. One thing students immediately notice is that the exact scope and definition of jurisprudence is disputed (which can be discomforting since all the other modules they have hitherto studied - Contract, Tort, Crime, etc- have clear definitions). This uncertainty is exacerbated by the fact that legal theories which come under the umbrella term of legal positivism have as one of their central themes the proposition that jurisprudence should only be concerned with positive law and that legal theory need not (and should not) look outside to ideas of morality or natural law. In other words not only do different legal theories have different explanations of the phenomenon of law, but they actually disagree about the scope of what it is they are supposed to be explaining! Traditionally jurists thought of God as the ultimate law-giver whose laws were written on human hearts (conscience). This is the &quot;natural law&quot; which human legislators add to by creating &quot;positive law&quot;. For example murder is contrary to natural law but you need human laws to define the different categories of homicide, the prescribed penalties, and the procedure by which accusations are tried and decided. You also need human laws to define the circumstances in which a contract comes into being etc. Note: positive in used in its old original meaning of &quot;laid down&quot; as distinct from natural. It is nothing to do with the modern meaning of positive as being the opposite of negative. William Blackstone, in Vol. 1, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) Page 27, wrote: This will of his maker is called the law of nature. For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the perpetual direction of that motion; so, when he created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws. Considering the creator only as a being of infinite power, he was able unquestionably to have prescribed whatever laws he pleased to his creature, man, however unjust or severe. But as be is also a being of infinite wisdom, he has laid down only such laws as were founded in those relations of justice, that existed in the nature of things antecedent to any positive precept. These are the eternal, immutable laws of good and evil, to which the creator himself in all his dispensations conforms; and which he has enabled human reason to discover, so far as they are necessary for the conduct of human actions. Such among others are these principles: that we should live honestly, should hurt nobody, and should render to every one his due; to which three general precepts Justinian1 has reduced the whole doctrine of law. This will of his maker is called the law of nature. For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the perpetual direction of that motion; so, when he created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws. Considering the creator only as a being of infinite power, he was able unquestionably to have prescribed whatever laws he pleased to his creature, man, however unjust or severe. But as be is also a being of infinite wisdom, he has laid down only such laws as were founded in those relations of justice, that existed in the nature of things antecedent to any positive precept. These are the eternal, immutable laws of good and evil, to which the creator himself in all his dispensations conforms; and which he has enabled human reason to discover, so far as they are necessary for the conduct of human actions. Such among others are these principles: that we should live honestly, should hurt nobody, and should render to every one his due; to which three general precepts Justinian has reduced the whole doctrine of law.... Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws; that is to say, no human laws should be suffered to contradict these. There are, it is true a great number of indifferent points, in which both the divine law and the natural leave a man at his own liberty; but which are found necessary for the benefit of society to be restrained within certain limits. And herein it is that human laws have their greatest force and efficacy; for, with regard to such points as are not indifferent, human laws are only declaratory of, and act in subordination to, the former. To instance in the case of murder; this is expressly forbidden by the divine, and demonstrably by the natural law; and from these prohibitions arises the true unlawfulness of this crime. Those human laws that annex a punishment to it, do not at all increase its moral guilt, or superadd any fresh obligation in foro conscientiae [in the court of conscience] to abstain from its perpetration. Nay, if any human law should allow or enjoin us to commit it, we are bound to transgress that human law, or else we must offend both the natural and the divine. But with regard to matters that are in themselves indifferent, and are not commanded or forbidden by those superior laws; such, for instance, as exporting of wool into foreign countries; here the inferior legislature has scope and opportunity to interpose, and to make that action unlawful which before was not so... In the Province of Jurisprudece Determined (1832) John Austin wrote at length about both natural law and positive law and sought to draw a line of distinction between them: AS one of the Law-Professors at the University of London, I planned and partly delivered a systematical Course of Lectures on General or Abstract Jurisprudence. In the ten lectures delivered at the beginning of my Course, I distinguished positive law (the appropriate matter of jurisprudence) from various objects with which it is connected by resemblance, and from various other objects to which it is allied by analogy. Out of those ten discourses, I have made the treatise which I now submit to the public, and which I venture to entitle “the province of jurisprudence determined.” Determining the characters of positive laws, I determine implicitly the notion of sovereignty, with the implied or correlative notion of independent political society. For the essential difference of a positive law (or the difference that severs it from a law which is not a positive law) may be stated generally in the following manner. Every positive law, or every law simply and strictly so called, is set by a sovereign person, or a sovereign body of persons to a member or members of the independent political society wherein that person or body &gt; is sovereign or supreme. Or (changing the phrase) it is set by a monarch, or sovereign number, to a person or persons in a state of subjection to its author. To elucidate the nature of sovereignty, and of the independent political society that sovereignty implies, I examine various topics which I arrange under the following heads: First, the possible forms or shapes of supreme political government; second, the limits, real or imaginary, of supreme political power; thirdly, the origin or causes of political government and society. Examining those various topics, I complete my description of the limit or boundary by which positive law is severed from positive morality. For I distinguish them at certain points whereat they seemingly blend, or whereat the line which divides them is not easily perceptitible. Austin's account of positive law (essentially a command of a sovereign accompanied by a threat of sanction for non-compliance) has been criticised as being simplistic and of failing to provide an adequate explanation of law and legal systems, but to be fair to Austin he never claimed that his theory of positive law could alone explain what happens in legal systems. He recognised the influence of natural law/morality as part of an explanation. He simply wished to define the limits of Jurispudence as an academic subject, which he did narrowly. Some jurists, however, have subsequently sought to produce theories of law which seek to explain what the phenomenon of law is, and how it works, based only on positive law. Such theorists are called &quot;positivists&quot; and their school of thought is called legal positivism. In 1960 Hans Kelsen published Reine Rechtslehre which was translated into English in 1967 as The Pure Theory of Law. As the word pure in the title suggests Kelsen's theory is in the legal positivism school of thought - i.e. it seeks to explain law and legal systems by reference only to positive law. Kelsen himself was a moral relativist but not all legal positivists are necessarily atheists or moral relativists. Some may personally think that natural law/morality is important but nevertheless think that the discipline of law should be &quot;self contained&quot; and should be capable of being completely and satisfactorily explained without brining natural law/morality etc. into it. Natural lawyers critique the theories of legal positivism by saying that they are incomplete as they leave so much unexplained. Legal Positivists reply that their theories have a restricted scope precisely because everything outside the scope of the theory is not really law at all and so does not need to be explained by the theory. So you can see that the definition of Jurisprudence is rather woolly but philosophy of law with particular emphasis on competing theories of what the phenomenon of law actually is might be a short rough definition to convey the general idea of Jurisprudence as the word in generally used today.
Japan's justice system is sometimes called hostage justice In general, the Japanese justice system has a more than 99% conviction rate! In part, this is because the number of state attorneys is super low - on about half the population of the US, there were only 2000 State attorneys out of 35000 lawyers in Japan, whereas the USA has a five-to-six digit number of state/district/... attorneys and 1.5 million lawyers in total. Or in other words: each state-employed attorney is responsible for more than 10 times the people and the caseload they create, and lawyers are prohibitively expensive. This leads to a two-pronged result: on the one hand, only the best cases should be followed up on and brought to court. Depending on the statistics, about every other case (~50%) that the police investigators hand to the prosecution is not followed up on by the prosecution. The other result is, that the Japanese justice system relies heavily on confessions obtained from the defendants. As I elaborated when comparing the detention time without charges, the Japanese justice system is unlike almost any other modern justice system in the world in some regards, even though it is a civil law system and most of the same principles can be found. The Japanese prosecution can detain people for up to 23 days without bringing the case, you can't have your lawyer present when talking to the police, and by clever tactic, the prosecution can hold a person nigh-indefinitely without even filing a case. As a result, the prosecution can often get confessions, and with a confession, the actual court case can become super fast: charges are brought, the confession is read, a little extra evidence is presented, and to spare the victim a lengthy trial with the confession in the room, the judge comes down with a guilty verdict. This is compounded by how the rules of evidence are laid out: investigation and the court case are allowed to happen at the same time! As a result, the case of the prosecutor tends to become better the longer the case drags on, resulting in the defendant either settling or giving a (partial) confession to some of the charges just to get it over because lawyers are crazy expensive. By giving a confession, they throw themselves at the mercy of the court for a mild verdict. And it's very much stacked As shown above, the Japanese justice system is already stacked against the defendant. But it is even more stacked than what is shown up there. As ohwilke noted in excellent comments, I want to preserve them here: Also the vast majority of Japanese criminal cases are tried without lay judges, This is by the way a result of the Japanese legal system that was set up in the Meiji era being based on the Prussian branch of the german Civil Law school. That was one of the dominant systems of the Meiji era next to the French and Spanish schools of Civil Legal Systems - and after WW2 they did not swap to a Common Law system but stayed with their own take on this Prusso-German branch of the Civil Legal System. This means there are no juries like in the common law system, and since 2009 lay judges in japan are increasingly used, but not in every case. Those lay judges are very much akin to the Schöffen in Germany, being allowed to question the evidence and such - the German school is based on an inquisitorial system after all - but it is not used in every case. And the whole system is lived extremely differently from the inspiring Prussian system, such as this part of the comment shows: and from my experiences talking with several Japanese judges at length about the issue (back in the early 1990s, maybe it is different now), the institutional mindset is for judges to believe that all of the prosecution evidence is true and all of the defense evidence is lies unless the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming and unshakable. The level of judicial bias towards the prosecution is greater than in any other common law or civil law legal system, that is not in an authoritarian regime, in the world. This for example shows in the 23 days without charge. Technically, 23 days is not the initial time, but the police has 72 hours. But they can extend this time by 10 days with a judge's order, and then again by another 10 days on the same charge offered on the paperwork. According to a statistic, 99.8% of these requests are granted, meaning they are almost rubberstamped. Legally, people that are detained are not yet defendants, they are suspects and kept in Substitute Prisons which are located in police districts - which further helps to get confessions. And this plays directly into another factor that differentiates the Japanese system from other countries: There's a huge cultural factor, which is what makes the Japanese system so different from others. Additional factors are that police officers in Japan have much more authority to handle minor cases outside the court system and routinely do so, that a certain level of criminal conduct from organized crime and by authority figures is tolerated, that there is much less crime per capita in Japan than most places, and that Confucian values re deference to hierarchy and the Japanese specific high cultural obligation to apologize influences how Japanese people interact with the criminal justice system as defendants and as implementers of that system. This has its problems too: Because the prosecution is notoriously overworked, citizens with problems are often more reluctant to bring cases to their attention. Further, the shame culture works against not just the perpetrators, but also the victims and the people that report certain crimes - for example, a female police officer was groped on a train, and when she reported it, she became the target of shunning. Further reading &amp; Research papers US Department of Justice: Toward a Balancing Approach: The Use of Apology in Japanese Society. US Department of Justice: Confession, Apology, Repentance and Settlement Out-of-Court in the Japanese Criminal Justice System -- is Japan a Model of Restortative Justice? (From Restorative Justice in Context: International Practice and Directions, P 173-196, 2003, Elmar G. M. Weitekamp and Hans-Jurgen Kerner, eds. -- See NCJ. Hiroshi Wagatsuma, Arthur Rosett: The Implications of Apology: Law and Culture in Japan and the United States, Law &amp; Society Review, Vol. 20, No. 4 (1986), pp. 461-498 (38 pages). John O. Haley: Comment: The Implications of Apology, Law &amp; Society Review, Vol. 20, No. 4 (1986), pp. 499-508 (9 pages). DAVID ALLEN CHIYOMI SUMIDA: Japanese tradition of apology, Western worry about admitting guilt can clash, (2002). HOSOI, YOKO AND HARUO NISHIMURA: The Role of Apology in the Japanese Criminal Justice System (1999). Ernils Larsson: Confucianism as a Religion in Japan’s Courts of Law (2022). Joseph I. Lieberman: CONFUCIUS'S LESSON TO LITIGANTS New York Times (1984). Lynn Berat: The Role of Conciliation in the Japanese Legal System American University International Law Review (1992). Nicholas Lassi: A Confucian Theory Of Crime, Dissertation, University of North Dakota (2018). Graham Mayeda: [Appreciate the Difference: The Role of Different Domestic Norms in Law and Development Reform; Lessons from China and Japan] (2006). Katrina Tran: How Japan How Japan’s Cultur s Cultural Norms Aff al Norms Affect Policing: A Side-By-Side olicing: A Side-By-Side Comparison with the United States Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic (2017). David Brooks: The Shame Culture New York Times (2016). podcast Dan Carlin: Hardcore History 62 – Supernova in the East I (2018).
Most judges went to law school Therefore, my null hypothesis is that they have next to no knowledge of statistics and couldn’t tell a median from a mean on their best, let alone, their average day - mean, median, or mode. Courts turn to experts to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. If they are asking the wrong questions, then it is the expert’s job to, respectfully, tell them so and guide them to the right questions. However, you shouldn’t guess what the right question is. “Excuse me, your honour, the term “statistical significance” can’t be applied to a data set, only to the result of an a priori null-hypothesis tested against that data set.” Feel free to explain p hacking if necessary. Ask the judge to explain, in layman’s term, what they want from you. Feel free to admit that just like you don’t understand their legal jargon, you don’t expect them to understand your statistical jargon; if everyone speaks plain English, you can go and do your statistics thing and they can go and do their law-talking thing.
In the example given, both elements must be established. This is the most common meaning of the word &quot;and&quot; in a statute or rule or contract or other writing, but there are times when &quot;and&quot; does not have that meaning. One must always determine the meaning from context on a case by case basis. Words do not have a single universal meaning in all contexts for legal purposes. This variation by context in the meaning of words for legal purposes is especially frequent in countries with common law legal systems based upon the English legal system such as the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and India to have situations where a word often means one thing in one legal context and another thing in different legal contexts. This is because the governing statutes and case law are written on a piecemeal basis by many different people with no one in charge of maintaining stylistic uniformity, over a very long period of time (often centuries). In countries like those of Continental Europe, Latin America and much of Asia and Africa, which have what are called &quot;civil law&quot; systems, that are based on European civil codes, there are comprehensive codifications of the basic laws of the land that are drafted by experts all at the same time, and amended only with great deliberation and care, and these codes tend to use a word more consistently in most contexts than common law legislatures and judges do, although even then, this principle is not absolute.
Why do you want to know? I think that the reason this question seems so obscure is because it does not involve sufficient context and specificity. It can't be answered until one knows the reason that it matters to know if a rule is new or not. In a particular context, these questions usually have obvious and clear answers. The murkiness arises only when one tries to overgeneralize. The life of law is not reason, it is experience. In general, it is almost never fruitful to try to apply legal principles of any kind to their logical conclusion without grounding that logic in fact specific and context specific precedents and applications. That approach to legal reasoning is a classic rookie mistake that gets a lot of young associate attorneys doing legal research into trouble by overstating the confidence that they should have in their conclusions when there is no case right on point addressing a situation. For example, if a federal government agency publishes something in the federal register that does not exactly restate an existing regulation, then it is a rule change, in the narrow sense that is changes an existing published narrowly defined Code of Federal Regulations rule. The process by which one does so derives from the Administrative Procedures Act and other authorizing legislation passed by Congress and also custom and case law interpreting these, so it isn't self-referential. A completely different context in which the question of whether there is a "new rule" of law is when a court according to the principles of stare decisis makes a ruling interpreting the constitution in a manner different from or expanding upon previously rulings interpreting the constitution in a similar circumstance. In this context, this matters because a "new rule" of constitutional law is generally given only prospective effect, while an interpretation of an existing rule of law that merely expands upon existing precedents in a foreseeable way has retroactive effect. In this situation, as in any case in which one tries to determine the best definition to apply under the law, the best approach is to look for a definition that produces just results given the consequences of a particular definition v. another particular definition. In that context, the determination of whether a rule is a "new rule" should depend upon foreseeability and the amount of reliance that people put on the old rule as opposed to the new rule being in force. There is no good reason to have transsubstantive legal meta-rules that apply to both of these situations. The former mechanistic rule makes sense in its context and makes the status quo clear and the events that constitute a change in the rule clear, while the latter consequence oriented definition makes sense in the completely different context where it is used. Surely, there are other contexts in which the question of what constitutes a "new rule" could have different consequences still. For example, to determine what constitutes a new v. old rule of U.S. Senate procedure, or to determine which statute is newer or older for purposes of determining which statute of two that conflict should be given effect when there was a cosmetic recodification of the section numbers of one of the titles but not the other without changing the substantive meaning of the recodified statute. The determination should generally be made on a case by case basis as there is no important purpose served by having a uniform metarule to answer these questions. If you are getting paradoxes trying to apply your legal theory, you are probably doing it wrong. For what it is worth, I have a dim opinion of Hart as someone who uses lots of words to say nothing of consequence or use, and I am not familiar with Biagoli or Suber. In general, legal theorists are not terribly influential in how the law is applied and interpreted in practice, although, of course, there are always exceptions.
The question should not include France and Germany, and should be limited to common law jurisdictions that are similar to India, because the function of judges differs starkly between adversarial vs. inquisitorial systems. The adversarial model pits two parties against each other, with the judge serving as the decider (of law, and perhaps of fact). The parties can offer witnesses, who can be compelled to respond to questions, and the attorney asking the question gets to control the question asked (subject to a possible objection by the other party, to be ruled on by the judge). The judge can rule on requests (which are not questions) i.e. petitions by either party. Otherwise, the judge sits there more or less mute, soaking up the argumentation being presented. Appellate proceedings are somewhat special in that the justices may address questions to the attorney, in order to better understand the logic of the proffered argument. The burden is on the attorney to make the case. There is no direct burden on the justice to &quot;make a case&quot;. The &quot;court of public opinion&quot; may be relevant in a jurisdiction where the justice is an elected office or is appointed for limited time. Or, the contrary opinion of a higher court may have some influence on a justice's rulings – this is not the case with a Supreme Court. In other words, it would be highly dysfunctional within the adversarial system for a party to be allowed to interrogate a judge. Formal petitions are allowed, as long as you follow proper form.
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.
You will note that the quoted definition says that person includes a corporation sole, a body corporate, and an unincorporated body What it doesn't say, but almost certainty intends, is that &quot;person&quot; also includes a natural person, that is an ordinary human being with a single body. What is happening here (I think) is that the law is specifying all the other things that will be treated in some way like a natural person, while it also assumes the &quot;ordinary&quot; or &quot;plain English&quot; meaning of person. Also, the law is assuming all the ordinary standard legal terminology, such as &quot;corporation sole&quot; and only giving definitions where the usage is in some way different from the standard meaning, or where there are multiple meanings in common use and it wants tom specify one. This makes the law shorter, but harder to understand for anyone not well-versed in that specific legal tradition (a non-lawyer, or say a lawyer from a civil-law country). So I am reasonably confident that you are, in fact, a person under this law. (Unless perhaps you are actually a robot or a space alien, after all on the net who knows. LOL)