Western law

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For the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario, see Western Law School.

Western law refers to the legal traditions of Western culture. Western culture has an idea of the importance of law which has its roots in both Roman law and canon law. As Western culture has a Graeco-Roman Classical and Renaissance cultural influence, so does its legal systems.


The rediscovery of the Justinian Code in the early 10th century rekindled a passion for the discipline of law, which crossed many of the re-forming boundaries between East and West. Eventually, it was only in the Catholic or Frankish west, that Roman law became the foundation on which all legal concepts and systems were based. Its influence can be traced to this day in all Western legal systems (although in different manners and to different extents in the common (Anglo-American) and the civil (continental European) legal traditions).


Western legal culture[edit]

Western legal culture is unified in the systematic reliance on legal constructs. Such constructs include corporations, contracts, estates, rights and powers to name a few. These concepts are not only nonexistent in primitive or traditional legal systems but they can also be predominately incapable of expression in those language systems which form the basis of such legal cultures.[1]

As a general proposition, the concept of legal culture depends on language and symbols and any attempt to analyse non western legal systems in terms of categories of modern western law can result in distortion attributable to differences in language.[1] So while legal constructs are unique to classical Roman, modern civil and common law cultures, legal concepts or primitive and archaic law get their meaning from sensed experience based on facts as opposed to theory or abstract. Legal culture therefore in the former group is influenced by academics, learned members of the profession and historically, philosophers. The latter group's culture is harnessed by beliefs, values and religion at a foundational level. Basically the latter group represents primacy of prejudices, myths and taboo as viable means to conduct human society.

See also[edit]


  1. ^ a b J.C. Smith (1968) ‘The Unique Nature of the Concepts of Western Law' The Canadian Bar Review (46: 2 pp. 191-225) in Csaba Varga (ed) (1992) Comparative Legal Cultures (Dartmouth: England).