What does law mean to you

Civil law is the legal system used in most countries of the world today. In civil law, the sources recognized as authoritative are mainly legislation – especially codifications in constitutions or laws adopted by the government – and customary law. [83] Codifications date back millennia, with an early example being the Babylonian Codex Hammurabi. Modern civil law systems derive essentially from legal systems promulgated by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I in the 6th century and rediscovered by Italy in the 11th century. [84] Roman law at the time of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire was highly procedural and lacked a professional legal class. [85] Instead, a lay judge, iudex, was chosen to rule. Decisions were not systematically published, so that any case law that developed was obscured and almost unrecognized. [86] Each case should be redecided from state laws, reflecting the (theoretical) insignificance of judges` decisions for future cases in today`s civil justice systems. From 529 to 534 AD, the Byzantine emperor Justinian I codified and consolidated Roman law, so that only one-twentieth of the mass of legal texts of the past remained.

[87] This corpus became known as the Corpus Juris Civilis. As one legal historian wrote, “Justinian consciously looked back at the golden age of Roman law and sought to bring it back to the peak it had reached three centuries earlier.” [88] The Justinian Codex remained in force in the East until the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Western Europe, on the other hand, relied on a mixture of Theodosian codices and Germanic customary law until the Justinian codex was rediscovered in the 11th century and researchers at the University of Bologna used it to interpret their own laws. [89] Civil codifications closely based on Roman law spread throughout Europe, as well as some influences of religious laws such as canon law, until the Enlightenment; In the 19th century, the France with the Civil Code and Germany with the Civil Code modernized their legal systems. Both codes influenced not only the legal systems of continental European countries (e.g. Greece), but also the Japanese and Korean legal traditions. [90] [91] Today, countries with civil justice systems range from Russia] and Turkey to most Central and Latin American countries. [92] The most prominent economic analyst of the law is the 1991 Nobel laureate, Ronald Coase, whose first major paper, The Nature of the Firm (1937), argues that the reason for the existence of firms (corporations, partnerships, etc.) is the existence of transaction costs. [230] Rational individuals negotiate through bilateral contracts in open markets until transaction costs mean that using firms to produce things is cheaper. His second major paper, The Problem of Social Cost (1960), argued that if we lived in a world without transaction costs, people would negotiate among themselves to create the same allocation of resources, regardless of how a court ruled in property disputes. [231] Coase used the example of a boring case called Sturges v Bridgman, in which a noisy confectionery manufacturer and a discreet doctor were neighbours and went to court to see who needed to move. [210] Coase testified that regardless of whether the judge ruled that the confectionery manufacturer had to stop using its machines or that the doctor had to live with it, they could enter into a mutually beneficial agreement on the movers, achieving the same resource allocation result.

Only the presence of transaction costs can prevent this. [232] The law should therefore foresee what would happen and be guided by the most effective solution. The idea is that law and regulation are not as important or effective in helping people as lawyers and government planners believe. [233] Coase and others like him wanted a change in approach to shifting the burden of proof of positive effects to a government that intervened in the market by analyzing the cost of action. [234] The philosophy of law is commonly referred to as jurisprudence. Normative jurisprudence asks, “What should be fair?” while analytical jurisprudence asks, “What is law?” However, the system has become too systematized – too rigid and inflexible.