civil law, criminal law and habeas corpus

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civil law, the law governing the relations between private individuals or bodies, as opposed to criminal, administrative, or constitutional law (see private law). Areas covered by civil law include the principles governing commercial transactions, the settlement of disputes in the fields of tort and contract, and matters involving family, property, and inheritance. In England, civil and criminal cases are heard in separate courts of law.

Civil law systems are those in which Roman law has had a decisive influence on legal principles, methods, and terminology in the field of private law. They are to be found in Continental Europe, Latin America, and parts of Africa and Asia (in modified form). The great 6th-century codification of Roman law, the Corpus Juris Civilis ('Body of civil law'), forms the basis of such systems, which are therefore called civil law systems. The development of different nation-states in Europe led to the codification of laws into distinctive systems, most notably the Code Napoleon, adopted in France in 1804 (and in other European countries through Napoleonic expansion), and the Burgerliches Gesetzbuch, the German Civil Code, which came into force in 1900. Civil law systems were subsequently exported through the process of colonial domination