The legal system is an integral unity of various legal phenomena and the relationships between them. It provides a regulatory framework for the type of law that prevails in a given territory. Depending on the scope and scale of such systems are divided into national and derived from certain historical traditions. The national order in the field of laws and regulations is specific to a particular country or small region. Several of these forms of law, linked by sustainable customs and the past, make up the family.
It is customary to associate the main legal systems of our time with the division of the legislative structures known to us into four types (families). First of all, it is a Romano-Germanic variety. This kind of system is characterized by a definite and clear hierarchy of various legal forms. A huge role in the folding and consolidation of these forms is played by a person or group of people who establish laws. The system of legislation itself has clear distinctions, and each of its varieties is a separate industry. This legal family is distinguished by the fact that, on the one hand, constitutions and the provisions enshrined in them are very important in it, and on the other, various acts specifying the norms set forth in laws are no less significant. This type of legal authority prevails in France, Germany, Italy and other countries that have adopted the system of Roman or German law, and it is usually considered classic.
In turn, one of the most interesting legislative families is Anglo-Saxon. Almost all the basic legal systems of our time, which have enshrined human rights in their constitutions, are trying to focus on it in this regard. Here, in the formation of law and its main types, the decisive importance belongs to the court, and the rules themselves are often formed during the debate of the parties and take effect after judicial decisions. Moreover, the creation of law is carried out by the so-called judicial precedent, because after the judges formulate the concepts and rules of a particular case and fix them in a decision, these norms become legal in any similar case.
Case law, which forms the foundation of the Anglo-Saxon family, is not its only characteristic feature. The basic legal systems of our time in their classical form establish a significant difference between private and public law, however, in the Anglo-Saxon version of the totality of legal norms, such a separation is practically absent. Moreover, the borders between branches of law are very blurred, and these varieties are not codified. This leads to the fact that the norms that determine the process of legal proceedings dominate in the entire legislative system, and the order according to which the state regulates various relations in society depends on them. This legal order was adopted in the UK and its former colonies - the USA, Australia, Canada.
The main legal systems of our time include quite old legislative families, such as religious and traditional. The first of them derives legal norms and codes from certain sacred texts that are interpreted by theologians. On the one hand, such a device of law is difficult to develop, since it is often believed that data beyond a prescription cannot be changed. On the other hand, different interpretations of theological terms, in turn, can lead to different semantic content of the same legal concepts. Such a right is often based on certain obligations of a person to God and is associated with moral requirements, but recently it has increasingly absorbed elements of human rights and his freedoms. Just as in the Anglo-Saxon system, there is no separation between private and public legal powers. This type of law is characteristic of many Muslim countries.
The concept of the legal system extends to the traditional family, where the totality of customs, prohibitions and regulations that have long been practiced in a given region or locality dominates. In China, Japan, many African countries, such norms are dominant, despite the fact that many of them have never been written down. A distinctive feature of such a system is that the state recognizes these traditions as mandatory, and their sources can be not only moral and religious, but also mythological representations. This is one of the most ancient holistic legal types that have survived to our time.