Civil law. The system of law peculiar to one state or people. Inst 1, 2, 1. Particularly, in Roman law, the civil law of the Roman people, as distinguished from the jus gentium. The term is also applied to the body of law called, emphatically, the “civil law.”
The jus civile and the jus gentium are distinguished in this way. All people ruled by statutes and customs use a law partly peculiar to themselves, partly common to all men. The law each people has settled for itself is peculiar to the state itself, and is called “jus civile,’ as being peculiar to that very state. The law, again, that natural reason has settled among all men, the law that is guarded among all peoples quite alike, is called the “jus gentium” and all nations use it as if law. The Roman people, therefore, usp a law that is partly peculiar to itself, partly common to all men. Hunter, Rom. Law, 38.
But this is not the only, or even the general, use of the words. What the Roman jurists had chiefly .in view, when they spoke of “jus civile,” was not local as opposed to cosmopolitan law, but the old law of the city as contrasted with the newer law introduced by the praetor, (jus prwtorium, jus honorarium.) Largely, no doubt, the jus gentium corresponds with the jus prwtorium; but the correspondence is not perfect. Id. 39.
Jus civile est quod sibi populus constituit. The civil law is what a people establishes for itself. Inst. 1, 2, 1; Jackson v. Jackson, 1 Johns. (N. Y.) 424, 426.