7. Code Some steps were taken during the reign of Louis XIV looking to a codification of the French law. Little, however, was accomplished, and the French people owe to the constructive genius of Napoleon the pres ent scheme of codification, which was under taken during the consulate at his dictation, and finally completed, one code at a time, shortly after the end of his reign. The Civil Code, which was the first, was enacted and became the law of the land 21 March 1804. It was pre pared by a council of jurists assigned by the First Consul to the work; but he himself took great personal interest in attending many of the sessions of the Commission and contributing much by his acute suggestions to the form and content of the law. With some fitness he is reported to have said, °I shall go down to pos terity with the Code in my hand.° This code, called at first the Code Napoleon, but now the Code Civil, has to do with the law of obliga tions, of persons, of personal status and of property. It contains 2,281 sections, many of them of only a line or two in length, and is comprised in a volume of less than 350 pages. The whole body of law in France at present, substantive and adjective, civil and criminal, is comprised in eight codes, as follows: Le Code Civil; Le Code de Procedure Civile; Lc Code de Commerce, Le Code Penal; Le Code &In struction Criminelle; Le Code Forestier; Les Codes de Justice Militaire. The scope and pur pose of each of these codes is generally and sufficiently disclosed by its title. This codifica tion is supplemented by the Lois Usuelles. The sources of the codified law of France are: (a) the ancient laws of the realm theretofore in force, consisting of local customs (custom of Normandy, custom of Paris, custom of Brit tany, etc.) ; (h) the written or Roman law: (c) such legislative enactments of the National Assembly, the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, and such of the Decrees of the Consuls and of the Directory, between 17 June 1789 and 15 March 1803, as were thought by the codifiers to be of permanent value; and (d) such general laws as have been enacted since 21 March 1804. The Roman law constitutes the foundation and groundwork of the struc ture, the other constituent elements indicated being merely subordinate or ancillary.
8. The Extent of the Civil Law Through out the The civil law in its modern ized form and substantially as enacted in the Code Napoleon has, within a century past, be come the law of more than three-quarters of civilized mankind. To be more exact, it is thus the law not only of France and of all her colo nies, but also of Italy, Greece, Switzerland and all the minor countries of southeastern Europe, of Spain and Portugal, Belgium, Holland and her colonies, of Austria-Hungary, Germany, Norway and Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Mexico, together with all the countries of Central and South America—all of the western hemi sphere from the Texas border to Cape Horn of Scotland and the Philippine Islands, the West Indies and Louisiana, of Egypt, of all the other civilized parts of Africa and of a majority of the more important British colonies. to-wit: Quebec, Ceylon, British Guinea and other English possessions in Africa, and Aus tralasia. It is also working its way into Turkey and her dependencies. The German Empire in 1900 adopted for the empire the Prussian Code, which is a Germanized version of the Code Napoleon; and Japan, as part and parcel of her scheme of civilization, has within recent years enacted a code of law on French lines, follow ing closely even its minor details, thus writing the law of Rome— the Codes of Justinian and of Napoleon—into the jurisprudence of the remote islands of the sea.
9. Resemblance Between the Civil Law and American Law.— Aside from matters of procedure and minor detail, the actual differ ences between the living Civil Law as it exists throughout the world and the English common law, as refined and modified in this country and now administered here, are not great, certainly not greater than we should reasonably expect, having regard to the controlling influence, conscious and unconscious — of the Civil Law, upon the growth and development of the com mon law in England, and having in mind the fact that many English judges, notably Mans field and Holt, and several of the chancellors for the past 200 years at least, have professedly drawn copiously from the great reservoir of Roman jurisprudence, whenever occasions have arisen for modifying or extending common-law principles or for applying them to new condi tions of fact and circumstance. The so-called
common law of England, certainly from the 1 lth century, is, in reality, largely the Custom of Normandy and the Custom of Paris, as imported at the Conquest in 1066 A.D. Its scientific terminology and its exact legal lan guage even in its present form are essentially French. Chief Justice Holt nearly 200 years ago said: °Inasmuch as the laws of all nations are doubtless raised out of the ruins of the civil law, as all governments are sprung out of the Roman empire, it must be owned that the principles of our law are borrowed from the civil law, and, therefore, grounded upon the same reason in many things.° (12 Mod.
Rep. 482). Sir William Jones, writing during the Revolutionary War, said: "With all of its imperfections, the Digest is a most valuable mine of judicial knowledge; it gives law at this hour to the greatest part of Europe, and though few English lawyers dare make such an acknowledgment, it is the source of nearly all our English laws that are not of feudal origin." And Mr. Hornblower, addressing the New York State Bar Association (1902), has said: "It is also well for us votaries of the common law to remember that there is another jurisprudence founded upon the Roman or the Civil Law, and prevailing throughout the greater part of continental Europe, from which we have ourselves borrowed many of the most important legal principles." If we eliminate from the law of England, as it obtains in this country, our technical rules of evidence, which have grown up about our system of trial by jury, our pleading and the peculiarities con nected with the tenure, transmission and devo lution of real estate (which are each of them, for the most part, little more than an antiquated mass of ignorance and rubbish, of which it is the modern tendency of our American juris prudence to relieve us), the rest of our system is not very different, at least in its elements, from modern Civil Law. The following subjects in American law may be mentioned, which have been largely influenced by the Civil Law, and re semble that system in many important elemen tary principles, namely, the subject of probate, of succession to personal property and testa mentary capacity; the law of admiralty; the law merchant, largely of continental origin; the law of equity and trusts; the law of corpora tions as Juridical persons distinct from cor porators; the law of res judicata, fully ex pounded in the Digest of Justinian; the theory and practice of habeas corpus, the leading prin ciples of which are found in the same compila tion; the law of alluvion, of accession and of wild animals; and finally the subject of obligations in general as arising from contract, quasi contract, tort, neglect and the operation of law, the logical arrangement of which by the civilians becomes more and more useful in legal analysis and discussion. To these we may add the general doctrines of public and private inter national law which are mainly of continental origin. (Howe, and Civil Law in America,' 16 Harv. Law Rev. 342).