Customary Law Systems

Legal systems whose rules derive from long-standing social practice and unwritten community norms rather than a code, a legislature or a religious text. Belongs here: Customary Law as the general field and Traditional Chinese Legal Tradition, whose classical legal order rested on Confucian social norms and imperial edict rather than an adversarial or codified Western model. Does not belong here: a modern national system that has absorbed customary elements into a formal code or common-law structure, such as South African Law, grouped under mixed legal systems.