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The adversarial system (or adversary system) of law is the system of law, generally adopted in common law countries, that relies on the skill of each advocate representing his or her party's positions and involves an impartial person, usually a jury, trying to determine the truth of the case.[1][2][3] As opposed to that, the inquisitorial system usually found on the continent of Europe among civil law systems (i.e., those deriving from Roman law or the Napoleonic Code) has a judge (or a group of judges who work together) whose task is to investigate the case. The adversarial system is the two-sided structure under which criminal trial courts operate that pits the prosecution against the defense. Justice is done when the most effective adversary is able to convince the judge or jury that his or her perspective on the case is the correct one. Some writers trace the process to the medieval mode of trial by combat[4], in which some litigants, notably women, were allowed a champion to represent them. Certainly the use of the jury in the common law system seems to have fostered the adversarial system, and there are many today who believe that it remains the best way of providing for the determination of a disputed issue. On the other hand, the new British Civil Justice reforms initiated by Lord Woolf (the Civil Procedure Rules or CPR) are prefaced with a case management system controlled by the judge rather than by the lawyers representing the different parties; similar case management systems are coming into use in the United States.
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