Browse by Legal System

This band groups every entry in this atlas by the broad legal tradition it belongs to: Civil Law, Common Law, Religious Law, Customary Law, the Socialist Law tradition, and the mixed and hybrid systems that combine more than one of the others. The six-family split follows the comparative-law classification used by the CIA World Factbook and the JuriGlobe research group, the standard reference scheme for sorting the world's legal systems by their historical origin and method rather than by any single country's own label for itself. A reader arriving here is choosing a tradition first, not a single code, court, or jurist; those sit in their own bands below, linked back to the legal system or systems they belong to by relationship rather than repeated here.