A friend of mine went to Tulane law school, and he told me that the university has two different requirements for students who want to practice law in Louisiana and who want to work elsewhere in the USA.
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Louisiana follows a “civil law” system, which differs from the “common law” legal system found in the other 49 states (although California has some civil law tradition as well). In practice, the differences these days are much slighter than they were 200 years ago, and in many fields the law is no different in Louisiana than elsewhere. But there are still some oddball vestiges, especially in areas like property law.
Other states have legal systems that , while distinct are all based on English common law – in essence that previous decisions in legal cases set a precedent. Louisiana’s legal framework is based on French law, which emphasis legislative statutes instead of case law.
Common law is English in origin. Judges traveled around and made decisions based on the local law, and their decisions built the legal framework from the bottom up via precedent.
Civil (Napoleonic) law is French in origin. It’s top down in that the law was comprehensively codified as is in a document first.
The difference between the two is somewhat moot nowadays as common law has a more robust code and civil law has had adjustments based on cases interpreting it, but you can still see differences in the approach that gets to the same point.
For example in the Canadian province of Ontario (English common law), there is no duty for members of the public to help someone having a medical emergency. Therefore there is a Good Samaritan law that protects people who choose to help from liability for their actions insofar as they are well intentioned (for the most part). In the Canadian province of Quebec (Napoleonic civil law) there is a duty of care for members of the public trained to a certain level of first aid to provide assistance. Since they are obligated to help under the law and not making a free choice to get involved there is no need for a Good Samaritan law.
This difference in the fundamental reasoning, though the end result is usually the same, is the basis for different instruction for law students in the U.S. where Louisiana is French civil law and the other states are (mostly) English common law.
Note that the use of the term civil law here is different from its use in criminal vs. civil.
edit: I encourage discourse and clarification in the comments. Above was merely a broad general summary, but I wanted to clarify for those who don’t dive deeper down the chain that the names of English Common Law and French Napoleonic Civil Law are just names that, like any word, convey meaning to those who understand what is meant by them. I chose Ontario and Quebec in my example because they were very explicitly colonies of France and England in Upper and Lower Canada so it fit well and sidestepped a lot of issues. In general though what we’re actually talking about is the approach of exhaustively codifying all laws in advance versus the approach of figuring it out as you go. These can be titled whatever one likes, and it just so happens that Eurocentric terminology is, for better or worse, used in the Western world where English is the lingua franca (heh) even if England/France is completely unrelated.
Louisiana’s civil law (i.e. not criminal matters) is based on continental European legal tradition (coincidentally known as civil law to contrast with the Common Law that is the English legal tradition, upon which the other 49 states and most English-speaking countries are based).
Louisiana was originally a French colony which passed into Spanish control, then back into French before being sold to the United States. Its legal system is specifically based on French law with some Spanish influence. When it reached the United States, it already had a well-functioning legal system, so there wasn’t really a need to set up a new legal system based on how things work elsewhere in the United States.
Jury trials are the most visible aspect of the Common Law to most people. However, various concepts in the law work differently. Most notably, the role of precedent relative to written statute of the law, contract law, property law, and inheritance law. As an American, French inheritance law seems rather weird to me.
Civil law versus common law.
With civil law, everything is codified. There is no judge made law. In common law systems, judges make law and that law is binding.
Canada is the same way. Quebec uses a civil law system (codified) and the rest of Canada is common law (judge made law).
The first difference that comes to my mind is they don’t use precedents like other states. I’m a writer, not a lawyer but part of my book is about a string of legal cases that destroy democracy (it’s a satire and a lot more complicated but that’s basically it) and because I’m not a lawyer (although I had to learn as much as I could) and these would be landmark cases which shouldn’t go through because if past similar cases, I did not want any precedents. Louisiana doesn’t do that so I could use that to both work in my favor as advancing a satire but also cover for my lack of detailed legal precedents.
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