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Common Law Research Indicates Common Law Countries Are Wealthier.

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Common law research today is shedding light on the fact that the countries that operate under common law systems appear to be wealthier than their civil systems counterparts.

The United States is one country that does operate under common law.

Under traditional common law, the justice system serves as a checks and balances of sorts towards both the legislative and the executive branches of government.

The purpose of this is to limit the governments ability to alter contract and property rights on their citizens.

Though America is known as a common law system, on paper, in reality, this country practices more and more civil law legislation than common law.

This is evident in the fact that our government is not concerned with ensuring that our contract and personal property rights are protected, as is strongly evidenced by today’s forfeiture and seizure laws, or eminent domain legislation.

But it may be to our advantage to continue to, albeit theoretically, operate under common law system, as common law research is showing that the countries that operate under common law seem to be wealthier than their civil system counterparts on a global level.

Economist Paul Mahoney for example has found that the economic growth of countries that operate under common law appears to be more efficient by as much as 33% than civil law systems.

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John Quaide on Common Law Rights

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Is the United States the Best Example of Common Law?

Is this common law research appropriate when using it as a means of analysis against the United States?

The United States is the leader of the free world, and the richest nation on the planet.

But the means that the government of America uses to obtain their financial resources is in direct opposition to what common law systems stand for.

So although the United States may be wealthy, it very likely has little to do with the fact that we consider ourselves to be “common law”.

Particularly since legislatively and criminally, we are charged and held accountable in a more civil system manner than a common law system.

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America Has Its Cake and Eats It Too

However, this consensus may be viewed differently when you view legislative systems at both the state and federal level.

All of the states in America, with the exception of Louisiana which operates under French civil code, utilize the common law system as the general legislative system for each state.

This is in effect unless a federal statute makes provisions for otherwise.

In other words, laws can be enforced through common law systems at the state level, but then be overrided by civil systems at the Federal level.

Common law research indicates that this gives United States the best of both worlds philosophy, where common law legislation will be used to fill in any gaps that the civil systems overlook.

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