What is The Difference Between Civil and Criminal Law

The terms civil law and criminal law are very common in the corridors of justice often used to refer to a case or cases being heard or taken to court.  However, a good number of people have little to no understanding of what these two terms stand for in and even worse, some of these people think of them as the same thing. There is a huge difference between civil and criminal law and as brought out in different constitutions across the globe. This text is going to look at the universally agreed definitions of these terms to help you understand what they are and how they apply, take a look:

What Civil Law

To best differentiate civil from criminal law, it is important to start by giving a clear definition of what these two facets of law are. Civil law refers to a legal system used to resolve disputes between two individuals, two companies, a company and an individual in many cases the application of the law ends with the wrongdoer compensating the aggrieved person. Civil law deal with relationships, businesses agreements and disagreements, property matters, breach of contracts and so on.

The genesis of civil in the entire globe is based on the ancient Roman laws and has been carried on for many years now. In the civil law systems, courts make decisions based purely on recorded laws from the past rather than a Judge or a Jury’s own well considered judgement.  A good example of a civil law is and how it applies is this. Supposing you lent a friend of yours a sum of $4000 and got into an agreement with him that he will pay you after one year, the year comes and goes and the friend still has not honored his payment pledge.

You reach out to him several times to recover your money but he is adamant that he does not want to you after which you decide to take the matter to court. In this case, you will sue your friend under the civil law and the case will be labelled as a disagreement between you two people over a repayment of money owed to a friend . In this case, you will need to convince the judge or the Jury that indeed you lent your friend the money you are claiming your friend owes and even provide evidence to support your claim.

From there, you will need to convince the jury or the judge that your friend had an obligation to pay your debt but refused to do so. The judge will listen to the case and make a determination that might include him ordering your friend to pay you back your money plus some fines in case the whole act of your friend refusing to pay you caused you some losses or interests. The judge can also upon your request allow you two to settle your dispute outside of the court.

Criminal Law

Criminal law on the other side is easy and quite simple to understand. It deals with a set of laws in a given country. For instance, most countries do not permit the act of killing and punish any offenders who break this law with jail terms or even death penalty in some cases. Therefore, if you murdered someone out of any reason then you will be charged under the criminal side of the law and punished accordingly.  It is worth pointing out that criminal law is always an individual verses the state and not two individuals against each other as is the case with civil law.

Conclusion

Criminal law and civil law are two facets of law that apply differently, civil law mainly involves disputes between two individuals while criminal law involves offences and crimes committed against the established laws of a country.