WikiProject Law	(Rated Stub-Class, Mid-importance)	LawWikipedia:WikiProject LawTemplate:WikiProject Lawlegal articles
Law portal v • d • e This article is within the scope of WikiProject Law, an attempt at providing a comprehensive, standardised, pan-jurisdictional and up-to-date resource for the legal field and the subjects encompassed by it.  Stub  This article has been rated as Stub-Class on the project's quality scale.  Mid  This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

WikiProject Politics	(Rated Stub-Class, Mid-importance)	PoliticsWikipedia:WikiProject PoliticsTemplate:WikiProject PoliticsPolitics articles
Politics portal v • d • e This article is within the scope of WikiProject Politics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Politics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.  Stub  This article has been rated as Stub-Class on the project's quality scale.  Mid  This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

In a typical civil law country, codes cover, at length, notions of private property: how to acquire or transfer property, corporations, how commerce takes places, etc. Civil trials, to a great extent, are about problems of property. So, saying that Socialist law is just like civil law without private property is somewhat weird.

What exactly are the similarities between civil and Socialist law? One may say that they tend to codify statute laws in codes — but so does the Federal Government of the United States. Another factor is that in the civil law tradition, courts don't make law — but the constant jurisprudence of, say, the French Court of Cassation is in practice equivalent to case law (and I doubt that similar freedom of interpretation was left to the courts in Socialist countries). David.Monniaux 12:29, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The similarities between socialist and civil law were: 1) process: the way that legal opinions are/were given was based on the civilian model of short opinions that are not binding on later cases; 2) form: socialist law is/was codified in a set of code provisions; 3) socialist and civil law educuation are/were similar.

Contents 1 Socialist Legal Systems 2 Merging Socialist law and Socialist legality 3 Property Law Comparison 4 Criminal/Citizen Law 5 History 6 Why does this page exist?

[edit] Socialist Legal Systems

I have included links at the bottom of this article to Cuban Law and Socialist Legality. If you know about these legal systems, please contribute. I have been attempting to finish up the Cuban Law article, but have not have time these last few months.

Also, if anybody knows about the legal system of Vietnam, Laos, or North Korea and would like to create more detailed articles about those, I think it would be a great addition to Wikipedia.

[edit] Merging Socialist law and Socialist legality

It seems to me to be a bad idea to merge socialist law and socialist legality as they are two independent things. Socialist legality is a concept that exists within the socialist legal system and socialist law is the type of law that is issued in socialist legal systems.

[edit] Property Law Comparison

From the article: "...the state owns all land but often not the structures that sit on that land. A rather complex ad-hoc system of use rights to land property has developed, and these use rights are the things being officially traded (rather than the property itself)" It just struck me that this sounds rather similar to the situation in the UK: property owners don't in fact own their land but have a freehold from the Crown. Very few land 'owners' have any mineral rights for instance.217.154.66.11 12:50, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Criminal/Citizen Law

This only talks about property law. What about criminal law? Hasn't criminal law in communist countries tended to be more heavy-handed than in democracies? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 64.75.187.195 (talk) 08:32, 5 March 2007 (UTC).

[edit] History

All the rest of the article is concerned with Chinese Socialist Law. We need more information on the Soviet and East European versions - and on Chinese Law itself before Deng's reforms (comment moved from article)

[edit] Why does this page exist?

There was never anything called "socialist law": I can find one article by one person on SSRN from 2007 which talks about the concept. But clearly, that's wrong: it wasn't because the countries were "socialist" that the law was distinctive, it was because the countries were undemocratic that gave them made the system procedurally despotic. This page itself cites no articles or books at all. There is nothing definitive about a law in "socialist countries" as a group- Soviet law was however recognised as a distinct field, because it was the law of the USSR. There was nothing particularly common about that and Chinese law. I think this article should be blanked and the material dispersed to other articles. Wikidea 16:02, 7 January 2009 (UTC)