Quote from: Mr Psychologist on October 12, 2015, 08:14:48 AM

When I first looked at the picture I thought the UK was green (muslim law) and I laughed a fair bit <.<

Hmm of the systems detailed here, Civil sounds slightly less uh... prone to whimsy. If everyone is following from the same set of rules rather than the rules set out by a higher court that dealt with a similar case a long time ago it seems a bit... better really.

I'm really not a fan of the yank system for arguing in courts, it really does seem to just be ripe for abuse and favouring those who hire the better (more expensive) lawyers <_<

Question though, I imagine it'd be unimaginably difficult for a country to change from common to civil - would you agree? <.<

Agreed with everything you said and yeah, it would be almost impossible for a country to make a complete change to the opposite system.

For a common law country to switch to a civil law system would require a complete overhaul of its established legal history. All relevant court rules addressing all particular scenarios would somehow have to be codified and turned into law. All practicing lawyers would have to be re-educated on how to apply laws rather than rulings, and they'd have to completely change the way they behave in court by partially abandoning the "contest to present the better story" mindset.

For a civil law country to adopt a common law system would also require a major overhaul. You'd either have to get rid of a lot of past laws and have jurisprudence fill in the gaps, or work with a dual system where court rulings decide the interpretation for the future and old (out of commission) laws work for the past. Plus, the courts and lawyers would have to switch to the "arguments rather than justice" approach, which I don't see many of them being able to get over.

Much more desirable (and actually very real) is slowly adopting measures and factors of the other system. For example, the US is almost entirely adversarial, yet employs an inquisitorial approach without a jury and with more power to the court for misdemeanors and traffic violations, and also has a constitution (which is generally rare for common law countries). And the other way around, many civil law countries have numerous common law and adversarial elements to them. Belgium, for example, has a more adversarial procedure for the most serious of crimes. It employs a jury (that is however assisted by a judge who still conducts the main investigation and trial) and focuses a lot on combining the cases presented by the parties with the independently established evidence.