Civil Law

Legal Heritage.

When Europeans began coming to America in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they brought with them two major legal traditions. Continental European nations had developed the civil law system while the English had formulated their own form of justice called the common law. The foundations of civil law can be found in the Corpus Juris Civilis, the code of Justinian. In the sixth century Justinian, the emperor of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, ordered his officials to reform and codify the law. These lawyers accumulated all of the existing laws, purged the obsolete ones, and revised the remainder into a comprehensive legal code. In the eleventh century Catholic legal scholars revived the Corpus Juris Civilis and made it the fundamental basis of law in continental Europe. The code provided clearly enunciated laws and procedures that judges...