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We didn't have a way of marking civil law (as opposed to criminal law) questions before today, and we'd mapped the tag to those questions relating to Civil Law (as opposed to common law).

I've made the tag for questions relating to Civil Law for now, and the excerpt for now clearly refers to non-criminal law. (I moved existing Civil Law questions to the tag before I did this, of course.)

This is a reasonably bold change, despite the fact that the Civil Law tag had only three questions tagged with it, and it seems like it would be prudent to have a non-criminal law tag. There is the tag, but I don't think that's exactly what we'd want.

So, I guess, I want to know if:

  1. I'm right and civil-procedure questions would be significantly different from questions that are just about non-criminal law;
  2. Whether there's a better tag for , that makes the difference clear. We obviously have tag excerpts to guide usage, but I couldn't think of a more descriptive name that would help organise questions as well.

Thoughts?

Also, if you're proposing new tags, it might be helpful for us to see a tag wiki excerpt, so we can see how users might use them.

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I suggest reverting civil-legal-system back to civil law.

Instead of civil-law I recommend using civil-practice or potentially using other keywords like Torts.

In my opinion that would also help distinguish it from civil-procedure

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  • Would you be able to write a sample tag wiki excerpt for each of these, so that we could see how users might use them?
    – jimsug Mod
    Commented Sep 2, 2015 at 13:40
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Civil-litigation would include and encompass everything under civil-suit/dispute (a suit being after filing and including pre-trial discovery), but can also include all things pre-suit, including demand letters, settling a case, compiling evidence, seeking legal advice as well as post-trial issues like calculating interest on a judgment, etc.

Civil-law can be any question, philosophically (not necessarily having to do with any litigation or procedural issues) that discusses any non-criminal legal issue from property law and contracts, to torts and constitutional law.

Civil-Procedure is the body of law, that sets forth rules of court from a procedural perspective. So, this is the tag I would want to use if I had a question like "how do I pin-cite a rule 56 motion?" or something like that.

I was newer to this site when I first suggested these distinctions, though, and they may well be unimportant or distinctions w/out meaning to the average lay persons seeking to ask a question. Whereas a lawyer will distinguish if they have a question on procedure vs. say, "what are the elements of trespass?" which is more civil-law, or "what goes into a demand letter in a personal injury case" which would go under civil-litigation.

If I was going to pick only one, I would put civil-law. If we want to really categorize these issues, then the tags are certainly distinguishable.

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  • Would you be able to write a sample tag wiki excerpt for each of these, so that we could see how users might use them?
    – jimsug Mod
    Commented Sep 2, 2015 at 13:40
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    Sure - give me a bit.
    – gracey209
    Commented Sep 2, 2015 at 13:44
  • I did so by editing my answer. It may be more confusing than anything, though, lol!
    – gracey209
    Commented Sep 7, 2015 at 20:38
  • Hmm. The primary distinction we're trying to make is between civil law, the system of law one finds in many European countries based on a civil code of some kind, vs civil law, non-criminal law in common law systems.
    – jimsug Mod
    Commented Sep 7, 2015 at 21:34
  • Well, civil law can be both. I see what you're getting at though. For example common law is used in U.S. and EU countries, born of mostly English law thats been modified and become law by precedent, even though it may or may not have resulted in codification. In the U.S., civil law is simply any non-criminal legal issue, including property law and other heavily regulated areas.
    – gracey209
    Commented Sep 7, 2015 at 21:40
  • So, in U.S./ Canada civil law is both common law and codified.
    – gracey209
    Commented Sep 7, 2015 at 21:42

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