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Canon law (from Ancient Greek: κανών, kanon, a 'straight measuring rod, ruler') is a set of ordinances and regulations made by ecclesiastical authority (church leadership) for the government of a Christian organization or church and its members.
Canon 285 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, which governs the Latin Church, states that priests "are to avoid those things which, although not unbecoming, are nevertheless foreign to the clerical state" and prohibits clergy from assuming "public offices which entail a participation in the exercise of civil power."
The canon law of the Catholic Church is articulated in the legal code for the Latin Church [9] as well as a code for the Eastern Catholic Churches. [9] This canon law has principles of legal interpretation, [10] and coercive penalties. [11] It lacks civilly-binding force in most secular jurisdictions.
For example, discovery in common law jurisdictions came about in part because of the influence of canon law on courts of equity. [11] Edson Luiz Sampel, a Brazilian expert in canon law, says that canon law is contained in the genesis of various institutes of civil law, such as the law in continental Europe and Latin American countries.
Some, such as the Church of England, has an ancient, highly developed canon law while others, such as the Episcopal Church in the United States have more recently developed canonical systems originally based on the English canon law. Unlike the system of canon law in the Church of England, which continues to be drawn from the canon law of the ...
Some authors conceive of canon law as essentially theological and the discipline of canon law as a theological subdiscipline, [19] but Msgr. Carlos José Errázuriz contends that "in a certain sense, all postconciliar canonical scholarship has shown a theological concern in the widest sense, that is, a tendency to determine more clearly the ...
The Code of Canon Law: A Text and Commentary. New York: Paulist Press, 1985. Commissioned by the Canon Law Society of America. John J. Coughlin. Canon Law: A Comparative Study with Anglo-American Legal Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Fernando Della Rocca. Manual of Canon Law. Trans. by Anselm Thatcher.
Secular courts in medieval times were numerous and decentralized: each secular division (king, prince, duke, lord, abbot or bishop as landholder, manor, [1] city, forest, market, etc.) could have their own courts, customary law, bailiffs and gaols [a] with arbitrary and unrecorded procedures, including in Northern Europe trial by combat and trial by ordeal, and in England trial by jury.