What Are The Similarities Between The United States And Spain Court System

This paper will compare the court systems of the United States and Spain which will explore the differences and similarities of the respective nations legal systems, Supreme Courts, and other aspects as it relates to the comparison of the these two nations judiciaries. Spain’s legal system is based in the civil law tradition in which its roots come from the law of Ancient Rome known as Roman law, in fact Spain was one of the first nations in Europe to apply civil law as the basis of its legal system during the age of exploration (Cal-Berkeley). A similarity of the civil law system as it relates to the common law system in the United States is that there has been at least of couple instances as it relates to property law that some courts in

In law that is not codified, this means that instead of writing down numerous details of specific parts of the law, the Common law system instead relies mainly on precedent in which the judiciary will render it’s judgment regarding a particular area of law based off of past decisions in cases with similar content (Cal-Berkeley). Another difference is the role the judge plays in a court case. In the Civil law system, the judge’s decision making has to be within the confines of the law meaning that regardless of who the judge is they have to render a ruling based off of what the law says which doesn’t allow for the judge’s personal interpretation of the law (Cal-Berkeley). Also, judges in the Civil law system are essentially in addition to being the judge, is also the investigator, jury, and prosecutor in a sense because they are the ones who files the charges against the party and in addition to presiding over the case they

The Constitutional Court which technically isn’t a part of the judiciary, however it does deal with conflicts as it pertains to the Spanish constitution that was drafted back in 1978 (Lasance). This means that although the Spanish Supreme Court is the highest judicial body in Spain its decisions can’t be in conflict with the constitution and in that instance only the Constitutional Court would have the power to overturn the decisions of the Court (Lasance). This situation unlike the judiciary of the United States in which the power to decide whether a law is in conflict of the United States Constitution is up to the U.S. Supreme Court itself to decide rather than an outside entity. Some of the lower courts include the Superior Justice Courts, Provincial Courts of Justice, and Courts of First Instance, Justice of the Peace Courts, and the National Court of Justice (Malavet). In the order of the Spanish judicial hierarchy, cases from the lower labor and administrative courts and cases from the Justice of the Peace Courts and Courts of First Instance are appealed up to the Provincial Justice Courts which deal with court cases from each of Spain’s 52 individual provinces (Lasance). From there