Legal Systems

Major legal systems around the world.

  • Law
  • 6 entries
  • CC0 — public domain
  • JSON3,026 B
  • YAML2,114 B · −30%
  • TOON1,750 B · −42%

The major families of legal systems: common law, civil law, religious law, customary law and mixed systems, with the origin and characteristics of each, plus socialist legal systems as a historical and residual family.

Use it when

  • You need to place a country's legal system in its family or explain how they differ.
  • You are comparing how legal rules are made and applied.

Watch out for

  • Most countries have mixed elements; the families are tendencies, not strict categories.
  • Many systems have changed substantially, particularly the former socialist legal systems.

The data

SystemOriginCharacteristics
Common LawEnglandJudge-made precedent, adversarial procedure.
Civil LawRoman lawCodified statutes, inquisitorial procedure.
Religious LawReligious textsBased on religious doctrines and interpretations.
Customary LawLocal customsDerived from long-established community practices.
Mixed SystemMultiple sourcesCombines elements of common, civil, or customary law.
Socialist Legal SystemSoviet lawState-centered, with law subordinate to party policy and a strong role for public ownership; largely transformed since the 1990s.

Fields

The shape of this dataset, read from the data itself: every column, its type and a real value. Agents can use this to plan a query without fetching the whole document.

SectionFieldTypeExample
datasystemstringCommon Law
dataoriginstringEngland
datacharacteristicsstringJudge-made precedent, adversarial procedure.

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curl "https://yjtoon.com/api/dataset/legal-systems-common-vs-civil?format=toon"
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  "https://yjtoon.com/static-data/dataset/legal-systems-common-vs-civil.toon"
);
const toon = await res.text();

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Topics

  • law
  • legal-systems
  • jurisdiction

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