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Review of Legal Systems Essay

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REVIEW OF LEGAL SYSTEMS

The legal system is a system developed to control the operation of a country’s regulatory, governmental and judicial authority who they supervise and impose the laws and regulations of the country. The legal systems that I choose to briefly review is my home country’s and in particular the Greek (Hellenic) legal system compared to the legal system of the United States of America (USA). I choose the above systems due to their differences and one similarity that they have.

The Greek legal system resides to the civil law tradition and it has been influenced by the Roman and Byzantine law (Blakesley, 1991) together with the modern civil law of the German state. The modern Greek law was established and evolved from the …show more content…

The US legal system is divided in several levels within USA. The constitution of the US establishes a federal government (Pomeroy, 1883). According to the Federal Judicial Center (n.d.) the US constitution provides certain authorities to the federal government. However not all authority is appointed to the federal government, individual states have their own legal codes, judicial system, state constitution and overall governmental framework.

The legislative work of the USA is performed not only by the federal government but also from each state of the USA as well. Moreover when the federal and state legislation do not provide sufficient governance then US common law and judicial precedent is applied (USDS, 2004).

US common law is a law tradition, originated from England, is a collection of previous court decisions and customary practices which can be said that it may fill the gap in the disputes not resolved by the federal and state legislation (USDS, 2004).

In accordance with the US Department of State (2004) the judicial precedent is applied when law interpretation is required. Therefore the court that is addressing the case may need to interpret a law as it was previously done by a superior court or other equal courts in a similar case.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE TWO LEGAL SYSTEMS

The Greek law system follows the civil law tradition and subsequently its judicial

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