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English law is the common law legal system of England and Wales, comprising mainly criminal law and civil law, each branch having its own courts and procedures. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] The judiciary is independent , and legal principles like fairness , equality before the law , and the right to a fair trial are foundational to the system.
Federal courts and 49 states use the legal system based on English common law, which has diverged somewhat since the mid-nineteenth century in that they look to each other's cases for guidance on issues of the first impression and rarely, if ever, look at contemporary cases on the same issue in the UK or the Commonwealth.
English and Welsh law can be described as having its own legal doctrine, distinct from civil law legal systems since 1189. There has been no major codification of the law, rather the law is developed by judges in court , applying statute , precedent and case-by-case reasoning to give explanatory judgments of the relevant legal principles.
H. Patrick Glenn argued that legal systems were a structurally inadequate way of thinking about law because they failed to capture the epistemic and ill-defined nature of law, arguing for legal traditions as a better unit of analysis. [12] Scholarly opinions on whether international law is a legal system have varied.
Civil law is sometimes referred to as neo-Roman law, Romano-Germanic law or Continental law. The expression "civil law" is a translation of Latin jus civile, or "citizens' law", which was the late imperial term for its legal system, as opposed to the laws governing conquered peoples (jus gentium); hence, the Justinian Code's title Corpus Juris Civilis.
The Senior Courts of England and Wales were originally created by the Judicature Acts as the "Supreme Court of Judicature". It was renamed the "Supreme Court of England and Wales" in 1981, [8] and again to the "Senior Courts of England and Wales" by the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 (to distinguish it from the new Supreme Court of the United Kingdom).
The primary contrast between the two systems is the role of written decisions and precedent as a source of law (one of the defining features of common law legal systems). [42] [15] While Common law systems place great weight on precedent, [90] civil law judges tend to give less weight to judicial precedent. [91]
A legal system is the system of laws governing a human society such as a nation state. The main articles for this category are Legal system and Legal systems of the world . Wikimedia Commons has media related to Legal systems .