Socialist Law vs. Civil Law

¶ … Justice Systems

The author of this report has been asked to answer several questions relating to comparative justice systems. Topics that will be discussed will include the concept of professed values vs. underlying values and the conflicts that can exist between the two, the primary sources of international crime statistics along with the strengths and weaknesses of the same, whether we can compare crime rates across nations, the dangers inherent to using international crime statistics, how the users of such data can increase the reliability of inferences/comparisons and the six characteristics of Socialist Law and how they differ from Civil Law.

While professed values and underlying values will commonly intersect, it boils down to where the person professing the values practices what they preach. Indeed, professed values are those that are asserted and proclaimed by the person that is asserting that they possess the values they mentioned. On the other hand, underlying values are those that are actually present within the behavior, psyche and personality of the person in question. For example, if a person says they are not racist against black people but they really are, the professed value is that they are not racist but the underlying value is that they are racist. These two will not conflict for many to most people, depending on the value in question. However, they might be the same and they might not be (Dammer, Fairchild & Albanese, 2006).

A primary source of crime statistics found for this report was the United Nations. Specifically, the author found the website for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC, 2015). The Bureau of Justice also has data about the subject (BJS, 2015). They are both strong in that they have a lot of data and they have data about a lot of different countries. They talk about a lot of different crimes, the rates of those crimes, the common committers of those crimes and so forth. One gaping weakness of both sites is that they rely on data from other agencies and groups and there is obviously a question about whether the data and the agencies reporting the data are truly reliable or not. As such, an accurate comparison of crime across nations, for that reason alone, can be difficult to impossible. Also, the cultural and social reasons for crime vary a lot from country to country so that muddies up the waters a lot as well. Further some nations actively lie and deceive about what is and what is not going in their nation. Police states like North Korea come to mind (Taylor, 2015). Because the data is not always provable or reliable, making comparisons or assertions about the data is not always possible or advisable and little can be done to change many of the reasons for that. Even so, the data that is reliable can be used in the proper way and using the proper techniques.

As far as civil law vs. socialist law, there are many differences. In civil law, there is no use of precedent, the judge will use the laws they see fit, the court procedure is usually investigatory, the parties/lawyers are basically there to assist the judge make a decision and the judge runs the case…not the lawyers. In Socialist law, real property does not exist like it does in civil law, the state owns all the land, "use rights" determines who can use things and why, litigants cannot rely on land use as something of value or collateral and so forth. Socialist law is actually quite similar to civil law but it existed/exists under a command economy. Further, privacy is less than valued, there is not an adversarial system like there is in civil law and intellectual property is basically non-existent, just to name a few things (Ramapo, 2015).