Legal Research

Law Like an Egyptian*

By Mark Lewis

With the events in Egypt capturing the world’s attention over the past week, I thought I would post some quick links to information pertaining to the Egyptian legal system here at Slaw. No small trick when you consider that internet access has been cut off in Egypt and government sites containing the Egyptian sources of law do not seem to be functioning; I think that is called irony.

WorldLII Egypt page. With the caveat that at the best of times the WorldLII Egypt page contains no databases it is only a catalog of information.

From the Hauser Global Law School Program at NYU: GlobalLex: An Overview of the Eyptican Legal System. A preview taken from here:

The Egyptian legal system, being considered as a civil law system, is based upon a well-established system of codified laws. Egypt?s supreme law is its written constitution. With respect to transactions between natural persons or legal entities, the most important legislation is the Egyptian Civil Code of 1948 (the ?ECC?), which remains the main source of legal rules applicable to contracts. Much of the ECC is based upon the French Civil Code and, to a lesser extent, upon various other European codes and upon Islamic (Shariah) law, especially in the context of personal status.

Despite the non-existence of an established system of legally (de jure) binding precedents, previous judicial decisions do have persuasive authority. Courts are morally and practically bound (de facto binding effect) by the principles and precedents of the Court of Cassation for civil, commercial, and criminal matters, and the Supreme Administrative Court for administrative and other public law matters.

As the Egyptian government site for the constitution is not working, here is the Wikipedia site for the Egyptian constitution and the Internet Archive site for the Egyptian Constitution from 2007.

Interestingly, the American University of Cairo website remains functional.

The Library of Congress guide to Egyptian Law.

Results of search for the hashtag #Egypt on Twitter.

I’ll add to this list as sources reveal themselves and update again when Egyptian law sites are functioning.

*With all due apologies to the Bangles

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 31, 2011 (boomark / email).