Civil law,
civilian law or
Roman law is a legal system originating in
Europe, intellectualized within the framework of late
Roman law, and whose most prevalent feature is that its core principles are
codified into a referable system which serves as the primary source of law. This can be contrasted with
common law systems whose intellectual framework comes from judge-made
decisional law which gives
precedential authority to prior court decisions on the principle that it is unfair to treat similar facts differently on different occasions (doctrine of judicial
precedent, or
stare decisis).