Civil law is the part of a country's set of laws which is concerned with the private affairs of citizens, for example marriage and property ownership, rather than with crime.

Civil law is a legal system originating in mainland Europe and adopted in much of the world. The civil law system is intellectualized within the framework of Roman law, and with core principles codified into a referable system, which serves as the primary source of law.

In civil law legal systems where codes exist, the primary source of law is the law code, a systematic collection of interrelated articles,[8] arranged by subject matter in some pre-specified order.[9] Codes explain the principles of law, rights and entitlements, and how basic legal mechanisms work.

An important common characteristic of civil law, aside from its origins in Roman law, is the comprehensive codification of received Roman law, i.e., its inclusion in civil codes. The earliest codification known is the Code of Hammurabi, written in ancient Babylon during the 18th century BC. However, this, and many of the codes that followed, were mainly lists of civil and criminal wrongs and their punishments.