Private law

Private law is the part of a legal system that governs interactions between individual persons. It is distinguished from public law, which deals with relationships between both natural and artificial persons (i.e., organizations) and the state, including regulatory statutes, penal law and other law that affects the public order. In general terms, private law involves interactions between private individuals, whereas public law involves interrelations between the state and the general population. In legal systems of the civil law tradition, it is that part of the jus commune that involves relationships between individuals, such as the law of contracts and torts (as it is called in the common law tradition), and the law of obligations (as it is called in the civil law tradition).