Civil law, as opposed to criminal law, is the branch of law dealing with disputes between individuals and/or organizations, in which compensation may be awarded to the victim. For instance, if a car crash victim claims damages against the driver for loss or injury sustained in an accident, this will be a civil law case. Civil law courts provide a forum for deciding disputes involving torts (such as accidents, negligence, and libel), contract disputes, the probate of wills, trusts, property disputes, administrative law, commercial law, and any other private matters that involve private parties or organizations including government departments. The objectives of civil law are different from other types of law. In civil law there is the attempt to right a wrong, honor an agreement, or settle a dispute. If there is a victim, they get compensation, and the person who is the cause of the wrong pays, this being a civilized form of, or legal alternative to, revenge.
Stockton, the county seat of San Joaquin County, is the 13th largest city in California in population and one of the largest in area in the Central Valley. Stockton has a population of 290,409, making it the 61st largest city in the U.S. Stockton is located in Northern California south of the state capital of Sacramento and north of Modesto. Stockton is along Interstate 5, State Route 99 and State Route 4 amidst the farmland of the California Central Valley. Stockton is connected westward with San Francisco Bay by the river’s 78-mile channel, and is, with Sacramento, one of the state’s two inland sea ports. In and around Stockton are thousands of miles of waterways and rivers that make up the California Delta. The city hosts the Asparagus Festival annually, and is the location of Haggin Museum, an art and history museum built in Victory Park in 1931. The museum displays works of art of the 19th and 20th centuries. Stockton is also a rail center and a processing and distribution point for farm products and wines from the Central Valley. Stockton has been the home of the University of the Pacific since 1924, after the university moved from San Jose. Pacific's longtime emphasis has been on music education, but now supports engineering, pharmacy, and business schools as well as the Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry in San Francisco and the Pacific McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento. Pacific's ivy-league atmosphere complete with old brick buildings and wide shady lawns have made it a movie location for a number of feature films. From 1995 to about 2005, Stockton and the nearby smaller cities of Tracy and Manteca experienced a population boom, due in large part to thousands of people settling in the area in an effort to escape the San Francisco Bay Area's relatively high cost of living. This influx of new residents, however, resulted in a sharp increase in the cost of living of Stockton (although it remained significantly lower than any Bay Area city of comparable size). As a result of the population increase, Stockton found itself squarely at the center of the United States' speculative housing bubble in the 2000s. Real estate in Stockton more than tripled in value between 1998 and 2005, but when the bubble burst in 2007, the ensuing financial crisis made Stockton one of the hardest-hit cities in America. Stockton housing prices fell 39% in the 2008 fiscal year, and the city had the country's highest foreclosure rate (9.5%) as well. Because of the shrinking economy, Stockton also had an unemployment rate of 13.3% in 2008, one of the highest in the U.S. Stockton was rated by Forbes in 2009 as America's fifth most dangerous city because of its crime rate.