Civil Law

Abstract

The concept of civil law has two distinct meanings. that is, disputes between private parties (individuals, corporations), as opposed to other branches of the law, such as administrative law or criminal law, which relate to disputes between individuals and the state. Second, the term civil law is often employed to indicate a legal “tradition” or a “family” of legal systems, this time in contrast with other legal traditions or families, in particular the common law. This is the sense in which we say, for example, that France and Germany are civil law countries while the USA and Australia are common law countries. The present entry will be concerned exclusively with the civil law in the latter sense.