common law

See also: common-law

English

Alternative forms

• common-law (attributive use)

Noun

common law (uncountable)

1. (law) Law developed by judges, courts, and agency adjudicatory tribunals, through their decisions and opinions (also called case law) (as opposed to statutes promulgated by legislatures, and regulations promulgated by the executive branch).
2. (law) Legal system mainly in England and its former colonies with a heavy emphasis on judge-made law, doctrines deduced by casuistry rather than from general principles, and law distributed among judicial decisions rather than codified statutes (as opposed to civil law).
3. (law, historical) Body of law and procedure administered in certain courts (known as law courts) in England and its former colonies characterized by a rigid system of writs, with a limited set of remedies (as opposed to equity or admiralty).
4. (law, Scots law, Roman-Dutch law) Law of general application throughout a country, province, or state as opposed to law having only a special or local application

Synonyms

• case law, decisional law, judge-made law, precedential law

Antonyms

• statute
• equity, admiralty
• civil law, Roman law, ius commune, canon law, ecclesiastical law

Coordinate terms

• constitutional law
• delegated legislation (U.K.)
• regulatory law (U.S.)
• statutory law

Derived terms

• common-law marriage

Translations

law based on court judgments and opinions — see case law

legal system of England and its former colonies

• Finnish: common law (fi), tapaoikeus (fi)
• French: common law (fr) f
• German: common law
• Hungarian: szokásjog (hu), angolszász jogrendszer
• Norwegian: common law
• Portuguese: common law f

law of general application

• Afrikaans: gemene reg
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 普通法 (zh) (pǔtōngfǎ)

• Estonian: üldine õigus
• Finnish: tapaoikeus (fi)
• French: droit commun (fr) m
• Japanese: 慣習法 (かんしゅうほう, kanshūhō)
• Khmer: ច្បាប់សាមញ្ញ (jbab sammanh)
• Romanian: drept comun (ro) n
• Russian: о́бщее пра́во n (óbščeje právo)

Portuguese

Etymology

Unadapted borrowing from English common law.

Noun

common law f (uncountable)

1. (law) common law (legal system)