Topic summary
Legal codes
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Code of law.
History
In the Americas, the influence of Continental legal codes has manifested itself in two ways. In civil law jurisdictions, legal codes in the Continental tradition are common. In common law jurisdictions, however, there has been a strong trend towards codification. The result of such codification, however, is not always a legal code as found in civil law jurisdictions. For example, the California Civil Code largely codifies common law doctrine and is very different in form and content from all other civil codes.