Code of law

A code of law, also called a law code or legal code, is a systematic collection of statutes that purports to exhaustively cover an entire body of law, or one major area of law, as it existed at the time of its enactment, through a process called codification. Codes have been produced across both civil law and common law traditions, though the process and the underlying motivation for codifying law differ between the two families: civil law systems typically treat a code as the primary and near complete source of law in its field, while common law systems generally use codes to consolidate or restate existing case law and statutes rather than to displace judicial precedent. The drive to codify law recurs across very different legal systems and eras, from the ancient Near East to the modern civil and common law worlds, whenever a government seeks a single organized statement of the rules it enforces. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/