Common Law And Civil Law Essay

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2.2 Common law and civil law

In this part we are considering two major legal systems, common law and civil law; the first one is neither written or codified it is mainly based on the decisions already made by judges on previous similar cases, it is the system applied by the U.S and the U.K, where a judge makes a decision about a certain case with the help of a jury composed of normal, responsible, and sane group of people from the community. The second system is known as the civil law which is the exact opposite of the common law, it is based on written statutes, countries that use this system base their decisions on a case based on facts and investigations, actually they use codes named Legal codes, those codes determine “all matters …show more content…

Also we notice that common law which is a system based on “precedents” i.e. decisions based on previous similar cases, it means that justice has already dealt with a resembling case, it is like having a blueprint for the judge to use, there is no need for codes and rules to solve and make a judgment about a certain case. Finally, as opposed to the civil law system, a case takes much less time to be solved in the common law system; the judge already has a blueprint about previous cases which makes the process easier for the judge. On the other hand, common law system has many disadvantages; for example, if a bad or unfair decision had been made on a previous case, and the court faces the same case again, the judge will make his decision based on a bad judgment. Furthermore, the absence of a precedent will make the judge’s duty more complicated; he/she will have no blueprint that he/she can use in the process of making the decision. Finally, we must stress the fact that indeed common law is seen as a source of difficulty, specially for law students, they have a hard time dealing with the common law system, especially when they’re living in a civil law country, common law is a non-codified system, it is …show more content…

Research on ESP:
3.1. Legal English research Northcott (2013) argues in his chapter concerning legal English that “Research in ESP generally has contributed substantially to the development of both the understanding and practice of legal English.” In fact to understand legal texts we need much more tools and experience which is not the case with other disciplines in the ESP. A legal text or document can be challenging and hard to analyze due to a number of factors such as the structure and form of the text, the type of vocabulary used, and also the style of the language used. A good example of the tools lawyers use when communicating via legal words, legal phrases, but also the use of Latin; here are some examples according to http://www.lawassist.lawaccess.nsw.gov.au/ :
Examples of legal words:
Legal words

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