Cuban Legal System Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Cuban Legal System - Essay Example military occupation. Cuba’s long and often strained association with the U.S. and a series of U.S. backed governments would lead to the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the current 50-year reign of dictator, Fidel Castro. The web article, Crime and Society: A Comparative Criminology Tour of the World summarizes the Cuban legal system as a composite of the three major stages of the country’s history, ending in what we know today as a socialist legal state. In 1973, the government promulgated the Law of Judicial Organization, establishing a hierarchical and more formal court system, replacing private law practice with law collectives-- strengthening emphasis on "socialist legality. Cuba’s civil law emphasizes written codes rather than precedent as the source of law. It utilizes an inquisitorial system of criminal procedure similar to that of Spain and France, with a smattering of Anglo American law including habeas corpus and a separation of courts and prosecutors quite uncharacteristic of Marxist-Leninist states. The article also sites key elements of Cubas "socialist legality" as an emphasis on substantive rather than juridical measures of justice; the use of law as a pro-active tool fo r socialist development; limited use of formal legal mechanisms for the resolution of private disputes; the use of informal "social courts" to resolve conflicts such as housing and labor disputes; direct citizen involvement in the judicial and crime control, and a system of state-organized law collectives to provide low-cost legal services nationwide. Regarding the latter, Raymond J. Michalowski writes of the non-adversarial system,â€Å"These attorneys, as intermediaries between citizens and the state, often found ways to utilize the formal framework of substantive and procedural laws to represent clients interests despite an official ideology that emphasized non-adversarial lawyering.† (Raymond J.