Between Anglo-Saxon or Roman court system, I would pick Roman. The greatest legal system ever.


However, (I must confess I do not know about Romania), modern criminal law is not Roman Law. (Neither is Civil law, although this is derived to a large extent from Roman Law, most notably in the areas of German Law)
In criminal law, for severe criminal cases, in France and Belgium a jury is obligatory.
Quote Originally Posted by Phillipvs Vallindervs Calicvla View Post
The basic principle of Germanic Law is that a free man is judged by his peers and sentenced by his superiors. In the Roman system you are judged by your superiors.

Freedom vs Slavery, if you ask me.
Trust me to consider the British legal system slavery.

Unlike Britain, France does not have a hereditary class system. Hence nobody has any superiors or inferiors. So everybody is judged by their peers.

Laws too are issued by the people themselves, instead of having to go through an unelected House of Lords (and bishops). These laws are then applied by independent judges, with the highest court not consisting of nobility and clergy.

Furthermore, England does not have a criminal code. Laws are nigh impossible to find, except by a mere handful of trained experts, who study legal history as some sort of arcane science. By contrast, in France criminal law is codified in a Penal Code. Everybody can look upo the appropriate law. These laws are then, theoretically*, to be strictly applied by judges and juries.

(*Which is a bit outdated. Shortly after the Revolution, the legal academies were closed and lawyers abolished. Instead, it was thought that everybody should receive a copy of the codified law, to be read themselves. Judges would then simply have to look up the appropriate law and apply it.
This proved unworkable. A bit naive.

But well into the nineteenth century, whenever law was codified, there followed a period of legalism. That is, of fixation on the law, sometimes complete with a prohibiton for judges to interpret the law.)