商法精品教学（广东外语外贸）Part 1-The Legal Environment of International Business Law.pptVIP

International Business Law HAN Yonghong September 2015 Lecture 1 The Legal Environment of International Business Law I. What is law? Definition of Law Law consists of enforceable rules governing relationships among individuals and between individuals and their society. Function of Law Law is the formal glue that holds fundamentally disorganized societies together.”---Hobbes (Leviathan) Law is the cement of society and also an essential medium of change. Knowledge of law increases one’s understanding of public affairs. Its study promotes accuracy of expression, facility in argument and skill in interpreting the written word, as well as some understanding of social values. ---Glanville Williams (“Learning the law”) Law and ethics: A society’s ethics essentially rest on a collection of shared beliefs. In all societies, ethics and law go hand in hand. law reflects and codifies a society’s ethics In the interest of preserving personal freedom, the law does not and can not codify all ethics. examples e.g. Tax evasion V. Tax avoidance Lecture 1 The Legal Environment of International Business Law II. Overview of world legal systems The Romano-Germanic Civil Law System The Anglo-American Common Law System The civil law system has its roots in Roman Law. It is employed by almost every country that was not a colony of the British Empire. In these countries the civil law is codified in the form of a civil codes. Typical examples are Code Napoléon (1804) and Civil Code of Germany (1896) Civil law relies on legislation, rather than judicial decisions for law. Civil law system do not recognize judge-made law. Common law is a system of law used in England, all of the states of the United States (except Louisiana) and other former British possessions such as Australia, Canada (except Quebec), India, Ireland, Jamaica, New Zealand and Hong Kong. It arose beginning in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as the English monarch ap