Parallels between Roman Civil Law
and English Common Law as exemplified
by the Rules that govern Litigation
and Obligations
The paper starts with the presentation of factors that probably stand behind
analogies between the Roman Civil Law and the English Common Law (1). These
factors concern the framework of the sources of law – the dominance of case-law,
the dogma of unalterable good-old law (2). Then the text presents the phenomenon
of domination of procedural rules over the substantive ones. Even the English
legal historians, although reluctant to concede that Romanisation also took
place in Albion, admit that to a certain degree “their” original writs and forms of
action in common law functioned similarly to the formulary system of the Roman
law (3). A number of parallels was detectable in the sphere of substantive law as
well. Then the paper focuses on the law of obligations, especially the contract
law (4) and the restitution law (5). Due to procedural reasons (“ubi remedium, ibi
ius” rule), the separate branches of law of obligations were founded in the closed
systems of nominate contracts, torts (6) and unjust factors leading to restitution
respectively. It is emphasized, however that these analogies should not be deemed
to be the examples of the reception of the Roman law by the English courts (7).

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