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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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.
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