civil law (legal system)

Civil law is a way of running a country's justice that puts its trust in the written book. The whole law is gathered into big, organized codes — a civil code, a criminal code, a commercial code — that try to spell out the rules in advance, so a judge mostly reads the code and applies it to the case in front of her. Picture a recipe book where the master cook has already written down every dish: the kitchen staff follow the recipes rather than inventing each meal from scratch.

This matters because it shapes who really makes the law. In a civil-law country the lawmakers in parliament are the chefs who write the recipes; judges are the cooks who carry them out. The law is meant to be there in black and white, knowable by anyone who opens the code — which is one reason this style spread so widely. Most of the world lives under it: France, Germany, Japan, Brazil, South Korea, and dozens more. China is often added too, though in a civil-law-influenced form: its codes are built in this Germanic style, but it is usually filed under its own socialist-law heading rather than counted as a textbook example.

A common mix-up is to think civil law means "lawsuits between private people" (as opposed to criminal cases). That is a different meaning of the same words. Here, "civil law" names a whole family of legal systems — the great alternative to the common-law tradition of England and the United States, where past court decisions, not a master code, do most of the heavy lifting.