Legal systems of the World

1. What is system of law? According to Russian scientists it is the internal structure of law defined by social relations. It is expressed by unity and coordination of all acting legal norms and their implementation in branches and institutions of law.

The characteristics of legal system are:

• reflection of the existing system of social relations;
• unity and consistency of all norms of law;
• dividing into relatively independent parts – branches, sub branches and institutions of law;
• close connections between different elements of law system;
• stability and dynamism.

2. When rules and laws become systematized inside one country they make national legal systems and these systems can be classified into families according to their main features.

There are about 200 hundred legal systems in the world. Throughout the history of mankind there were various attempts to classify them. In the past, legal systems have often been grouped by geography, history, culture, race, language, religion, or official ideology. Nowadays, scientists define the following legal massifs:

• national legal systems;
• legal families;
• groups of legal families.

3. Although each modern system has its own individuality, it is possible to group many of them into legal “families”. The existing legal systems of nearly all countries are generally modeled upon elements of several main types:

• civil law (Roman-Germanic legal family), including French law, the Napoleonic Code, Roman law, Roman-Dutch law, and Spanish law;
• common law (Anglo-Saxon legal system), including United State law;
• Slavonic law, including Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian law;
• religious law, including Islamic and Hindu law;
• customary law, including mostly African law systems
• mixed or pluralistic law.

4. Speaking about the additional type of legal system - international law, it can be referred as the law which governs the conduct of independent nations in their relationships. Its part, the law system of European Community, has become the first example of newly created supranational legal system.