Global Legal Systems, Legal Families and their Classification
Abstract
The founders of the comparative system approach to the study of law (among the first were American R. Schlesinger, French R. David and M. Ancel, later Germans H. Kotz and K. Zweigert, Italian R. Sacco, Canadian P. Glenn, etc.) at the turn of the 1960-1970s have made a breakthrough in legal science. They have completed building the ground of a new direction of comparative legal research, identified and analyzed various legal commonalities of the past and present referring to them as families or systems (Anglo-Saxon, Romano-German, Socialist, Muslim, etc.). Many Russian authors still follow this terminology. The terms “legal system” and “legal family” are often used as similar, the concepts of system and family are not given as a rule. The Anglo-Saxon legal family and totalitarian socialist legal system belong to the same classification unit. The article suggests a new approach and a synthesis of legal systems. The author uses the methods of historical, logical, deductive, inductive and comparative study, formational-civilizational approach and, on this basis, identifies three major legal systems in the contemporary world: Muslim (1.7 billion people), liberal semi-social capitalist system (applies to more than 4.5 billion people, including many developing countries) and the totalitarian socialist system (1.5 billion people). When selecting legal families, the traditional approach of comparative law is used, but considering the social and cultural legal features. On this basis, within each of the global systems legal families differ. In the system of Muslim law, there is fundamentalist Muslim law (radikalist) and modern (advanced) legal family. There are classifications differ in Sunni and Shiite legal families, liberal semi-social capitalist system includes Anglo-Saxon family, Romano-German and other families (modern researchers call in particular Latin-American, Scandinavian families, etc.), in the totalitarian socialist system, there is orthodox and partially modernized families.
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