As a comparatist and legal theorist, I must say that most discussions of the civil vs. common law tradition - both in the popular press and in the legal academy - tend, alas, to reveal more about the prejudices and stereotypes through which lawyers and laypersons alike perceive other countries and legal traditions than about how these legal systems really operate. Balanced as it may seem, I think this article still exaggerates the differences between the two traditions. In fact, judges have always played a significant role in law-making in both common and civil law countries. Even in France, supposedly the cradle of the civil law tradition and the birthplace of the Napoleonic codes, entire areas of law, such as administrative law, have been developed by the courts with very little in the way of codified legislation. Also, borrow a copy of the French Code civil at the nearest law library and you'll see that each article comes annotated with long lists of judicial holdings. Go and visit a law firm in Germany, France or Italy, you'll see that lawyers and their assistants spend much of their time scouring casebooks and database for "previous decisions" (they don't say "precedents") on the case at hand. In my view the persistent belief that there is a fundamental difference between common law and civil law systems is primarily the result of ideology (most people, law professors included, want to believe their legal system is the best, a belief more easily entertained by making bad caricatures of foreign legal traditions) and judicial rhetoric (generally speaking, civil law judges, because of the French revolution and its emphasis on statutory legislation as the "will of the people", have been more cautious to avoid being exposed as policy-makers). Going beyond superficial divergences in etiquette, dress-codes and writing styles, a systemic analysis is more likely to reveal that a common law judge and her civil law counterpart will resolve the disputes brought before them in light of the same set of legal and extra-legal considerations. Look at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, systematic quantitative studies have demonstrated that there is no statistically significant difference in voting behaviour between judges from common law jurisdictions (Ireland and UK) and civil law jurisdictions. A British human rights lawyer appointed to the Strasbourg may discover he has more in common with her Italian colleague than with the Irish judge when the latter happens to have a background in diplomacy. - See more at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/07/economist-explains-10#sthash.9mtWDQiG.dpuf