Talk Elections

These are the three dominant judicial systems of the modern world. Which do you prefer? Or do you find an alternative judicial system preferable?

Personally I'm leaning towards civil law for two reasons:
1)Some states(Egypt and Iraq) have abandoned common law for civil law, whereas no countries have abandoned civil law for common law.
2)Non-Western countries that escaped European colonialism(Japan, China, Korea and Thailand) all chose to adopt civil law rather then common law(despite Britain+America having been the most prominent Westerners to these countries). The exception being those Islamic countries which sustained Sharia law.

Common Law.

Who voted for Shariah law?!

Of the three, common law (since it's the only one to acknowledge the concept of individual rights), but an "alternative system" obviously.

As you can tell from my avatar, I prefer Shariah Law. ::)

Alternative system. Start with a civil code and then let common law principles of flow and case law and precedent take over from there. I'm also interested in certain types of customary law, but only in the societies in which they are, well, customary.

The idea that Obama supports Sharia law or anything resembling it is patently ridiculous.

Are Egypt and Iraq models to follow? And might not this move have to do with anti-British sentiment following liberalization rather than anything else?

As for the second point, I think there are specific reasons here. East Asia was generally quite influenced by Germany when it comes to legal systems, as I recall.

There is a fair bit of empirical research indicating that common law countries perform better economically and democratically, but of course such research always carries with it a lot of potential biases that might be hard to disentangle.

Then why didn't countries that escaped French/Portuguese/Dutch control abandon common law out of anti-French/Portuguese/Dutch sentiment?

Maybe the momentum for it wasn't there? You have 2 data points, there are obviously a myriad of reasons going in to it.

Also, it seems like it must be harder to just chuck in common law, since it's typically developed organically.

Napoleonic Code :P