  In practice no modern legal system has functioned without the decisions of the courts playing at least an auxiliary role in settling the content of the law. To take one well-known example, in France the law of civil wrongs (torts, delicts) is based upon five relatively short articles of the Code Civil (§§ 1382–1386). Formally, the law is found in those five articles, and a court decision is legally flawed if it does not cite at least one of them as the basis for its ruling. But there is a vast body of cases interpreting and applying those articles, and these cases are regularly cited before the courts to assist them in reaching their decisions, even though judgments themselves do not mention earlier cases. In substance, then, if not in form, this area is partly constituted by judge-made law.