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This chapter looks at civil law. Civil law is the counterpart and the typical object of comparison to the common law. The distinction between these two legal families is one of the few on which comparative lawyers largely agree. In highly simplified descriptions found mostly in older texts, the unique feature of civil law is often identified as legal codification, especially of private law. The main aspects of this legal mindset are the doctrine of legal sources, the systematization of law, the method of statutory interpretation, and the role of legal authorities. All of these things influence the way in which law is applied in everyday practice and are the products of a specific historical evolution. The fundamental character of civil law can only be understood when the interplay among all these factors is considered.

This chapter is both an exploration of the processes of development of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP), and a call for prudence in its legal codification. It proceeds as follows. First, it examines the initial articulation of the RtoP in the 2001 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. Thereafter it considers the adoption of the RtoP by the United Nations General Assembly during the 2005 World Summit. Next, it turns to the reaffirmation of the RtoP by the Security Council in 2006 and the 2009 General Assembly debates on the topic. The chapter concludes by arguing that while the RtoP remains a non-legally binding norm, human security is best served through gradual development rather than immediate legal codification.

This chapter considers the questions of legal codification, education, ‘police’, and censorship in terms of a conflict between the hosts of God and Caesar. Warsaw and Rome engaged each other on several fronts. The king wanted papal blessing for the Constitution of 3 May 1791, and so reined in reformers (linked with Hugo Kołłątaj) who wished to use the projected ‘Code of Stanisław August’ to restrict papal jurisdiction and end monastic autonomy in the Commonwealth. The monarch was also happy to help avert a request to restore the Jesuit order, which would have embarrassed the pope. The newly founded Police Commission encountered some resistance from the clergy in its attempts to regulate hospitals and move cemeteries outside city walls, but much cooperation in combating vagrancy. The episcopate was frustrated in its efforts to implement ecclesiastical censorship of works on religion or corruptive of morals, although few laymen opposed the principle.

This chapter explores European influence on Ottoman captivity in the 1850s–1870s, through the humanitarian movement, including the Red Cross, and the codified law it spawned: the Geneva Convention and the Brussels Convention. Humanitarianism, during the Crimean War, led the Porte to end the wartime enslavement of civilians. But otherwise, it came to the Ottoman Empire during and after the Crimean War, as it did elsewhere, and helped Ottoman captives on the same terms as others. The Porte signed multilateral treaties at the same time as other states, and Ottoman captivity practices structurally resembled, though did not fulfil, the new rules. More importantly, during the 1877–78 Russo–Ottoman War, the Ottoman Empire came to use the language of European customary law—the Law of Nations—to defend its practices and assert its place. This was the first time the Porte did so with respect to captivity.