Case Law: Significant meanings to Vietnam.

Vietnam have authenticated the validity of case law in the law system. Could case law, a quite new legal term to Vietnam, play any important role in Vietnamese judiciary?

The approval of applying case law into practice could be considered as the most noticeable change in the efforts of the government to renovate the judiciary in Vietnam. As you might notice, most nations today follows one of the two legal traditions: civil law or common law. In common law system, case law has been in practice for such a long time ago and it is one of the typical features of common law. Interestingly, the law system in Vietnam is more likely to be identified as part of civil law system. Therefore, the fact that a country like Vietnam applying the case law has proved that there has been a huge change in the legal conception of the legislators in Vietnam, that is legalizing the useful factors regardless of the their origins.

The question is what case law could provide when it is officially applied in Vietnam? This seems not to be a hard question to come up with an answer. Firstly, it would undoubtedly help the court to solve a civil case in a much faster way. Instead of having a long procedure of litigation, the judges only need to find a similar legal case that has already been solved before. This has two considerable effects. One is that the case law would reduce the pressure of the Court in general and the judges in particular of having a great number of cases to solve. The other is that this method would help the dispute arising between the litigants to be solved without a long duration of time.

Moreover, with the vision of being mentioned over generations through the judgments if they become sources of case law, the judges would be much more careful when solving a civil cases. They would also aware that they have to keep improving their legal knowledge. This would definitely leads to a result that the quality of Vietnamese judges would be much higher. The better the judges, the less bad judgment are made.

Vietnamese are not quite interested in how there problems are regulated in the Codes or by-law documents. As a tradition that has been existed for such a long time, people seem to hesitate when mentioning about the law in general. However, with the fact that the validity of case law has been authenticated, people would have a much different way to approach the law system. Looking for a similar case which has already been judged is something people would pay more attention than if they have to read all the related codes which I think they found it very boring. I believe that with only a small amount of time after the case law are brought into practice, the legal awareness of people would be raised into a much higher level.

As all the analyzed reasons above, case law should be an integral part of Vietnamese law system.