cost of enforcing them very high. In fact there are very few clear-cut cases of
success attaching to any civil disobedience campaigns, in part because govern-
ments have learned not to react too harshly to such protests, and thus the mass
waves of sympathy have not followed. It is important not to confuse civil
disobedience with the general right, in a democracy, to protest peacefully and
in a fully law-abiding way. Such protests may often have much the same impact
as is expected of disobedience campaigns, especially in terms of policing them
and in the chance of over-reaction by the authorities.
Civil Law
Civil law can have two distinct meanings. One meaning, in Anglo-American
usage, refers to the continental European tradition of ‘code law’, which is often
called civil, or even ‘civilian’, law, as distinct from thecommon lawso
important in the Anglo-American tradition. The prime distinction is between
the gradual accretion of precedents, statutes, rulings and even traditional legal
customs which characterizes common law, and the conception, not entirely
accurate, of civil law consisting of formal rules deliberately created, codified
and passed by a legislative body. In this tradition, which has characterized
the entire European legal experience, decisions made by courts in particular
cases do not have binding precedential impact on future cases, though
‘La Jurisprudence’, a series of interpretations, may heavily influence the way
the code will be read. In the common law system, courts are legitimate makers
of law, and law is seen as evolving continually from a distant past; civil law is
static, fixed in the form laid down by the legislature. The sources of civil law in
this sense are partly the codified law of the Roman Empire, especially as
rediscovered by the European universities after the Dark Ages, partly the canon
law of the medieval Church, and partly the laws recodified under Napoleon
after the French Revolution. (Much of European law is still sometimes
described as being the Code Napole ́on.) This tradition of civil law exists in
certain parts of the common law world where a French presence has been
important, notably in the State of Louisiana in the USA and the Province of
Que ́bec in Canada, with some vestigial remains in Scottish law. As common
law has become increasingly codified, and as courts are seen less and less as
legitimate makers of law, the distinction between common law and civil law
has narrowed. Internationaltribunalswhose deliberations have an impact on
national legal systems, notably theEuropean Court of Justice (ECJ)and, to
a lesser extent, the European Court of Human Rights (see alsoHuman
Rights Act), tend to operate like traditional civil law courts, but the presence
of English judges on them has had the effect of diminishing the importance of
the old distinctions. Furthermore, a court operating within a developing
Civil Law