Legal Origins and Human Rights law

Abstract

A widely studied topic in comparative law is the extent to which countries’ legal origins—and especially whether they are a civil or common law system—are associated with the substance of their contemporary laws. We contribute to this line of research by using data from a range of sources to explore whether common law and civil law countries have different substantive legal commitments in an area where the enduring influence of legal origins remains unclear: human rights law. We specifically explore differences between common law and civil law countries along five dimensions. We find that, compared to countries with common law legal origins, countries with civil law legal origins enumerate more constitutional rights, ratify more human rights treaties, enumerate more citizen duties, and are more likely to have legal regimes that incorporate international human rights treaties into their domestic legal order.

Keywords: Legal Origins, Comparative Law, International Law, Human Rights Law