German Legal System

German law is a system of civil law founded on the principles of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, though many of its most important rules, including much of the civil code known as the Burgerliches Gesetzbuch or BGB, were developed before the 1949 constitution. It is made up of public law, which governs relations between a person and the state, including criminal law, or between two bodies of the state, and private law, which governs relations between individuals or companies. The system has drawn on a wide range of influences from Roman law, including the Justinian Code and the Corpus Juris Civilis, and to a lesser extent the Napoleonic Code. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The modern German legal system is a civil-law system founded on the principles of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, though its component codes substantially predate the postwar constitution. Its centerpiece private-law code, the Burgerliches Gesetzbuch, was the product of over twenty years of drafting following German unification in 1871, drawing on the Pandectist revival of Roman law as well as medieval Germanic custom. The Federal Constitutional Court functions as the highest authority in constitutional law and, to some extent, German law as a whole. Its codification model proved internationally influential, shaping the legal systems of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.