Учебный год 22-23 / Watson - The Evolution of Western Private Law

© , The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published

An expanded edition of The Evolution of Law, published Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The Johns Hopkins University PressNorth Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland - www.press.jhu.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data will be found at the end of this book.

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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For Olivia Robinson

Contents

. : The Cause of the Reception

vii

Preface

An author who calls his book The Evolution of Law, or even The Evolution of Western Private Law, has taken a stance. He indicates a belief that law does not arise solely from the conditions of the society in which it operates, but that there is a pattern or patterns of development that transcend state or national boundaries. That there is such a pattern or patterns can, I believe, be demonstrated at a basic level even in a preface. Thus, most modern Western systems of law are traditionally and, I believe, properly divided into civil-law and common-law systems, from which it follows that any civil-law system has more in common with any other civil-law system than with any common-law system. The division, I must emphasize, relates to the system of private law, not to constitutional law or to police regulation. This division of legal systems, however, is not paralleled by social, economic, or political conditions in the countries in which the legal systems operate. Civil-law and commonlaw countries alike may have experienced similar economic and social circumstances, such as the Industrial Revolution, that have bypassed other civil-law and other common-law countries. And the nature of government, whether democratic or tyrannous, does not affect the classification of the legal system. Among civil-law systems are, for instance, those in France, Haiti, Argentina, the Netherlands, and, I believe, the nations that formerly were part of the Soviet Union. Common-law countries include England, Ghana, the United States, and Nigeria. Some other systems, such as Scotland and South Africa, are termed “mixed systems,” partaking of elements of both common-law and civil-law systems. These last two countries are vastly different in racial mix, geography, and climate.

These basic differences between civil-law and common-law systems can therefore be explained only in terms of the legal traditions them-

ix