Justice and Hammurabi's Code

The thing is that legal terminolgys are confusing for the layman and you really need to be a lawyer to comprehend them and even then I am not sure we always know what we are talking about.

 

Private Law is a term employed when you have law which affects the rights of private individuals and dose not involve government bodies acting in their official capacity. A defamation suit against a newspaper for instance. Civil Law strictly means any suit which is not a criminal one, but the crucial difference here is that even a criminal suit can be a civil one if it entails a private prosecution*; hence the name; civil; by civil i.e  non offical people.

 

Civil Law System; On the other hand is different from Civil Law, this is the system based in Continental Europe, Louisiana, S America etc, this system is based upon legal codes, the court system is inquistorial in nature (meaning the court takes an active interest in the case and in investigating and determining the truth, as opposed to the common law adversarial procedure, where the courts hears the two parties; the adversaries, give their version of the case and then gives its judgement), as opposed to the common law system in use in the Commonwealth and the US, which is based on case law and is adversarial in nature.

 

GLCE2003 got confused between the two when I said "whether you meant the common law in use or the civil law" and thought I had implied that the civil law was not in use in England as opposed to the civil law system. My mistake I should have made that clear, but in my defence the term 'civil law' is used for both, even though they mean different things.

 

*In judistrictions which still permit a private prosecution. England still dose I believe, but only with the AG's premission. A private prosecution is when the prosecution is carried out by a private party  rather than by the state.

 

Sparten, I'm a lawyer trained in the Continental/Civil law system I also have a law degree from the US, so I'm familiar with the basics and terminology of the both systems and I'm not really a layman in the realm of law 

 

I understand what you are talking about, but I still think gcle2003 was correct in what he said.

 

One point I want to add however. In the Continental or Civil law system if you will, the distinction between public and private law is made not really based on the parties, but based on so-called concept of legal relationship. When the parties are free to draw the rules by themselves without following mandatory regulations (as for example in sale contract), this is called a private relationship (law), even though one party to the contract could be a government body acting in its official capacity. However, when the rules of the relationship are mandatory and can't be changed (as for a example in Criminal or Administrative law where one must comply with the rules established by the state) it's called public law or jus publicum. This concept is inherently continental and comes from Roman law, I don't think Common law has it.