steve h on 12 Mar 2003  •  Link

Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (ca. 1758) was for two centuries the basis for teaching the principles of English (and American) law. Although written almost a century after Pepys began his diary, it is profocundly historical in nature, tracing legal practices back to Anglo-Saxon times. It is especially strong on the rights of indivisuals and the rights of property.

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon…

Terry Foreman on 5 Jul 2016  •  Link

Civil law, civilian law or Roman law is a legal system originating in Europe, intellectualized within the framework of late Roman law, and whose most prevalent feature is that its core principles are codified into a referable system which serves as the primary source of law. This can be contrasted with common law systems whose intellectual framework comes from judge-made decisional law which gives precedential authority to prior court decisions on the principle that it is unfair to treat similar facts differently on different occasions (doctrine of judicial precedent, or stare decisis). Historically, a civil law is the group of legal ideas and systems ultimately derived from the Code of Justinian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civ…