The relationship between criminal law concepts and civil law concepts

Abstract

The first part of the first chapter is a survey of the major factors influencing the formation of law. We refer to the major not all the factors which influenced our predecessors in time when they embarked on the strange but comprehensive human phenomenon known as law, because needless to say, it would be difficult to consider exhaustively all possible influencing factors. The basic, original, need for the creation of laws seems to have arisen from the need of the maintenance of order in a community. This entailed granting a superior power or aggregate of persons the right to punish and the right to use force in the name of peace and stability. The "superior" power may not have been formally delegated: it may well have been violently assumed or the result of initiative·, and the passive deference or obedience of others. Nor would the punishments and exercise of force be always reasoned out, proportionate or even civilised. One comes across this concept in most of the early modern writers of treatises on the codified Civil and Criminal Codes. Thus Toullier, looking back to the genesis of law writes: "Le leggi non sono, ne rapporti, ne ri sul tamenti di rapporti; ma regole di azione pres cri tte da un superiore" (Val. I Sec 0 I para. 3). He defines the civil law as~ "una re go la di condotta prescritta a tutti i cittadini dal loro sovrano legittimo, sopra un oggetto di comune interesse, merce la dichiarazione solenne del potere legislativo esso comanda, sotto certe pene o con certe ricompense, cioe' che ciascheduno deve fare, non fare o tollerare, per il bene generale della societa'. (Vol. 1. Sez. I para. 13).