Mexico's Legal System

The United States has held beliefs that Mexico’s legal system is not functional regarding the nature and function of their system. However, the Mexican government does in fact have a highly evolved and organized legal system with few exceptions to its functionality (Stende-Berger, 2015). Mexico’s legal system was based on French, Greek, and Roman legal systems (Stende-Berger, 2015). Their legal system is fairly common with other countries throughout the world but the United States legal system is significantly different (Stende-Berger, 2015). In the United States most businesses and foreign owned corporations do not have to work through the legal system, where in Mexico they would have to directly deal with the legal system (Stende-Berger,

The legal rights themselves are created and defined by substantive law. There’s a different set of rules that will generally govern criminal procedure and civil procedure, or the specific procedure followed in trials and in appeals. Federal rules for civil procedure regulate actions in the federal court system (Cornell University Law School, 2015). Procedural law is made up of state or federal statutes established by constitutional law of the United States (Cornell University Law School, 2015). Specifically, the particular provisions ensure due process of law in the United States. Similarly, the Mexican government has a Mexican Constitution that governs how they will deal with procedural law (Stende-Berger, 2015). The United States bases their common law system on case law and statutory law and was derived from England in the American colonies before the American Revolution (Stende-Berger, 2015). Case law is based on customs and usage rather than legislative enactments. In contrast, the Mexico civil law system was derived from Roman law and uses codes and statues of the Emperor Justinian, called Corpus Juris Civilis (Stende-Berger, 2015). For years, Mexico’s civil law system and the United States law differed with the use of codification, the use of Civil Code and Commercial Code (Stende-Berger, 2015). However, there is no longer a distinction between the two legal systems. The United States has enacted multiple federal codes including bankruptcy, immigration codes, and tax codes. Although, each state has different codes in the United States most have adopted some version of Uniform Commercial Code (Stende-Berger, 2015). Also, the United States enacted codes for education, family, property, probate, and government. In comparison, the Mexican government uses a similar codification to address the specific topics as well. The