CLE Vlog on Common Law vs. Civil Law - with Prof. Holger Spamann (Harvard)
For a long time, scholars have been classifying most legal systems around the world as falling within one of two inherently different categories: common or civil law systems. In the new episode of the Center for Law & Economics vlog & podcast series, Prof. Holger Spamann (Harvard) examines the myths and the reality of common and civil law with Alessandro Tacconelli (ETH Zurich).
While common law, rooted in England and practiced also in the US, involves precedent or deference to previously published judicial opinion; civil law, practiced in continental Europe and elsewhere in the world, does not – or so many still think. After a brief explanation of the alleged differences between the two systems and the history of such distinction at the beginning of the vlog episode, Prof. external page Holger Spamann (Harvard) explains the findings of some of his work on the topic.
In his paper ‘external page Judges in the Lab: No Precedent Effects, No Common/Civil Law Differences’, he and his co-authors recruited 299 real judges from seven major jurisdictions to judge an international criminal appeals case and to determine the appropriate prison sentence, to show that: (i) document use and written reasons did not differ between common and civil law judges, and (ii) ‘precedent effect’ was barely detectable. Similarly, in his working paper ‘The Reasons Highest Courts Give,’ Prof. Spamann and co-authors quantitatively analysed 80 representative opinions of English and German apex courts in the late 19th century and early 21st century, to find that, even in 1880s, opinions of English and German courts differed in degree rather than kind and that, by the 2000s, the Germans cited precedent as frequently as the English.
In the current vlog episode, Holger Spamann discusses the findings of his studies with Alessandro Tacconelli (ETH Zurich).
