2.3 Civil Law System

The concept: the Roman-law's family — the codified law's primacy (the statute-and-code as the law's source); the systems: the continental Europe + the Latin-American-and-Asian-and-African recipients (the world's largest family). The origin-and-development: the Roman law's core (the Twelve Tables to Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis — the Roman jurists' craft; the glossators-and- commentators' medieval revival — the Bologna's university birth); the national receptions (the German reception's Romanisation; the French Revolution's codification); the Code Napoléon 1804 (the modern civil code's model — the clarity-and-accessibility revolution); the German BGB 1900 (the scientific codification — the Pandectists' conceptual craft); the global export (the Spanish-and-Portuguese-and-Japanese mediations). The features (the exam's list): (i) the codification's primacy (the comprehensive code's ideal — the gapless law's ambition); (ii) the legislation's source-supremacy (the judge as the applier, not the maker — the Montesquieu's "mouth of the law" idiom); (iii) the inquisitorial procedure (the judge-led investigation — the adversarial contrast); (iv) the career judiciary (the professional-bureaucratic judges — the common-law's practitioner-judges contrast); (v) the abstract doctrinal style (the general- clauses-and-concepts craft); (vi) the civil code's centrality (the persons-property-obligations architecture). The sources: the constitution-and-codes; the implementing legislation; the custom's secondary role; the case-law's "unofficial" status (the jurisprudence constante's de facto authority — the courts' line-following); the doctrine's weight (the professors' law — the scholarly authority). The impact on the Nepalese legal system:…