Legal families

  • Law, policy, and regulation
  • Legal system

Definition

‘Legal families’ is a term used to denote the set-up of a particular legal system by identifying certain basic aspects, such as the types of rules and practices that are particular to any group of legal systems. While each system would be distinct, it can be identified as belonging to a particular family if it possesses the features attributed to that family.

Example: Common law and civil law.

Other terms with the same meaning and function: Legal tradition.

References

See also, civil law, common law, legal system in the primer on public law and regulation. 

Heavily adapted from: Berkeley School of Law, The Common law and Civil law Traditions, 2010 the Robbins Collection, available at: https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/CommonLawCivilLawTraditions.pdf, accessed on 1 November 2024