An inquisitive (aka inquisitorial) legal system is one in which the judge acts as both judge and prosecutor, personally digging into the facts before ruling.
In the German system, digging into the facts before the ruling is part of the job of the judge. They are doing it from a neutral perspective, but digging into facts is part of what they are supposed to do. In Anglosaxon common law on the other hand it’s the job of both parties of a legal case to law out all the facts that they think support their side and it’s not the job to dig into facts that neither of the sides presented.
I’m curious to understand that a bit better, if you don’t mind (and happen to be familiar enough with the German legal system to answer). Which of the following would a German judge commonly do in the course of an ordinary proceeding?
(i) Ask a witness to clarify statements made;
(ii) ask a witness new questions that, while relevant to the case, do not constitute clarifications of previous statements made;
(iii) summon new witnesses (including but not limited to expert witnesses) without application from either party;
(iv) compel a party to produce documents not in discovery, without application from the other party;
(v) compel third parties to produce documents neither party has requested be produced.
All the above used to be pretty standard in most jurisdictions AFAIK. But what tends to happen nowadays is that either some of those are expressly disallowed, or else, while judges may well retain legal authority to perform all those kinds of digging, in practice that authority is used very sparingly.
Not for this kind of fact, I’m afraid – my experience is that in answering questions like these, LLMs typically do no better than an educated guess. There are just way too many people stating their educated legal guesses as fact in the corpus, so it gets hard to distinguish.
You define your terms when you say:
In the German system, digging into the facts before the ruling is part of the job of the judge. They are doing it from a neutral perspective, but digging into facts is part of what they are supposed to do. In Anglosaxon common law on the other hand it’s the job of both parties of a legal case to law out all the facts that they think support their side and it’s not the job to dig into facts that neither of the sides presented.
I’m curious to understand that a bit better, if you don’t mind (and happen to be familiar enough with the German legal system to answer). Which of the following would a German judge commonly do in the course of an ordinary proceeding?
(i) Ask a witness to clarify statements made;
(ii) ask a witness new questions that, while relevant to the case, do not constitute clarifications of previous statements made;
(iii) summon new witnesses (including but not limited to expert witnesses) without application from either party;
(iv) compel a party to produce documents not in discovery, without application from the other party;
(v) compel third parties to produce documents neither party has requested be produced.
All the above used to be pretty standard in most jurisdictions AFAIK. But what tends to happen nowadays is that either some of those are expressly disallowed, or else, while judges may well retain legal authority to perform all those kinds of digging, in practice that authority is used very sparingly.
When it comes to trying to understand basic facts like how legal systems work LLMs make it easy to get an overview.
Not for this kind of fact, I’m afraid – my experience is that in answering questions like these, LLMs typically do no better than an educated guess. There are just way too many people stating their educated legal guesses as fact in the corpus, so it gets hard to distinguish.