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Legal Traditions Made With The Constitution Of The United States

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There are several legal traditions that are present in the world today, however the two dominant traditions used by different countries are the Common Law Legal Tradition and the Civil Law Legal Tradition.
Dammer and Albanese explain how “The Common Law places great emphasis on case precedents and fine distinctions of procedure” (Dammer and Albanese, 2014, p. 62). A country that uses Common Law is of course the United States of America. In the United States judges use case precedents that were decisions made by other judges based on their interpretation of the Constitution of the United States of America. Many important interpretations have been made with the Constitution to include Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona, and Terry v. Ohio.
Another country that uses Common Law Legal Tradition is the United Kingdom. Common Law was …show more content…

An example of a country that uses Civil Law would be France. France Civil Law came from their 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizens (Dammer and Albanese, 2014, p. 76). With the French, their penal code is divided into 5 different books.
Another country that also uses the Civil Law Tradition is Germany. Unlike the French, who took only a few years to draw up a civil code, it took Germany 20 years to put together a German code. Even though the unification of Germany took place in 1871, the code did not actually go into effect until 1900 (Dammer and Albanese, 2014, p. 48). After WWII, Germany began using Common Law Traditions some but still mainly used the Civil Law tradition.
There are countries that use a hybrid of different laws. Once example of this would be China, which uses Socialist Law Legal Tradition and Civil Law Tradition. China adopted codes of law in 1979 to cover the Civil Law portion however, since the Communist Party makes majority of the major decisions in the country, the Socialist Law Tradition takes precedent over the Civil

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