Discuss (c) Dayabhaga

The legal system defined: the law's TOTALITY-in-context — the rules + the institutions + the actors + the culture (the operating whole): the definition's four components — (i) the normative (the rules-and-principles' structure); (ii) the institutional (the courts-and-enforcement machinery); (iii) the professional (the bench-and-bar-and-academy); (iv) the cultural (the legal consciousness — the society's law-mentality). The importance: the system's comparison (not the isolated rules) as the comparative law's true unit (the "legal family" concept's base); the characteristics' catalogue (the family-identification's criteria): the historical genesis; the sources-and-methods; the ideology-and-philosophy; the institutional style; the legal culture — the criteria by which the world's systems group into families (2.2-2.6's map).