English law (and its colonies, by extension) developed very, very differently than the Continent. Roman law vanished after the fall of the Roman Empire in Britain, and instead the laws of England developed out of a syncretic mix of Norman law (derived from the Roman civil law) and Anglo-Saxon common law. In practice, this means that English law and its colonial relatives to this day still feature a heavy dose of uncodified laws that have been set by judges over the centuries. This means that Parliamentary legislation in England largely functioned to tweak the existing structure of judge-made laws rather than to eliminate the system entirely. This, incidentally, has also led to the preservation of juries in the common law system, a feature generally not present in civil law countries.

In contrast, on the Continent the civil law system developed out of the Roman law system, and there is a much stronger tradition of law codification. As such, judges are permitted much less discretion than in common-law countries; in theory, judges were allocated no power to establish general, binding laws, as in England.