This module aims at facilitating students to understand the organization, functioning and jurisdiction of Courts under the Rwandan Justice system


The aim of this module is to introduce the student to the rules governing the law of civil, commercial, labour and administrative procedure, which rules aim at facilitating the trial process. This course is designed to acquaint the students with the various stages through which a civil case passes through, and the connected matters. The course also includes law of limitation. The course teacher shall endeavour to familiarize the students with the case papers (like plaints, written statements, Interlocutory applications, etc.) involved in civil cases and touch upon the provisions of Evidence Act wherever necessary.


It is well known that Administrative law is the branch of law that oversees the bodies of government that are responsible for administration. In fact, agencies that function in an administrative capacity generally work as a branch of public law and deal with decision-making arms of the government. Boards, agencies and commissions are bodies that function as part of the administrative law system. As legislative bodies the world over have created additional government agencies to regulate social, political and economic cultures since the early 1900s, this type of law has expanded internationally

The generally accepted view amongst writers is that modern commercial law developed out of the medieval law merchant (or lex mercatoria) which governed practices and disputes between merchants and traders before it was ‘swallowed up’, ‘borrowed’, ‘absorbed’, or ‘incorporated’[1] by the common law, a process which began in the seventeenth century.[1]  The culmination of this process was the series of ‘great codifications’ that took place in the United Kingdom at the end of the nineteenth century.

 

One conclusion that might be drawn from this simple historical picture is that modern commercial law is, as it always has been, essentially a body of rules concerned with trading and business relations.  This explains the persistence of topics such as negotiable instruments or contracts of carriage.  It must be recognised that the modern world of business transactions is considerably different to nineteenth century merchant activity and so, modern commercial law has, with varying degrees of acceptance, added new topics to its menu.  But even taking these recent additions into account, overall the standard picture remains unchanged: commercial law is driven by, and is responsive to, the needs of commerce.