Mixed Legal Systems

Mixed legal systems, or jurisdictions, as they are classically called, make up roughly fifteen political entities, of which eleven are independent countries. Most (excluding Scotland and Israel) of these are the former colonial possessions of France, Netherlands, or Spain, which were subsequently transferred to Great Britain or the United States.

Their inelegant name is an accident of history. Legal cartographers during the height of the British empire were unable to fit these entities into the civil law or common law mold, which dominated their thinking, and hence simply called them mixed or hybrid to indicate their otherness. Though comparative law classification schemes have long since been improved and expanded, the group continues to be referred to by this name, in part because of tradition and convenience and in part because of the unique traits that distinguish it from other systems.

The sources of law in mixed jurisdictions are far from uniform, and the differences shape the styles of individual systems. The French group (Quebec, Louisiana, and Mauritius) exhibits the influence of the Code Napoléon and thus possesses civil law in a codified form, which some think makes it more resistant to common law penetration than uncodified mixed systems are. The Dutch group (South Africa and Sri Lanka) consists of uncodified Roman-Dutch law that stems from institutional writers such as Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Johannes Voet (1647–1713), which necessitates a strong system of stare decisis. The Spanish group (Puerto Rico and the Philippines) is somewhat like the French group because the 1889 Civil Code of Spain was crafted in the mold of the French Code Civil. On the common law side of the coin, whether the jurisdiction's common law footing stems from Great Britain or the United States also makes an important difference to the development of the system.