I agree, and it mostly is. I'm pretty sure it is always recorded when a congressman speaks about a bill, plus they always show dissenting opinions of the SCOTUS.

However, one major problem is that language changes with time. Words go out of favor, and change meaning. Sometimes they change their meaning to be the exact opposite. Sometimes there are contenpary dictionaries with conflicting definitions.

I think all laws should have an expiration date, and have to be debated, and possibly reworded again and again over the generations.

Until “thou shalt not kill” gets held hostage by a senator who wants a subsidy for a coal mine.

Exempt those kinds of laws - murder, theft, false witness? Congrats, you have a de-facto theocracy.

In contrast, common law is more open to interpretation, changes over time, etc.

Yes, this is super generalized, but the dichotomy explains two very different approaches to how countries approach their writing and interpreting of laws.

Where "this way" includes all sorts of implementation details that may or may not be important.

Think of a baker in some kind of baker's guild, who was taught as an apprentice various techniques for how to get the best rise from their bread, before any scientific understanding of what those techniques are doing. The baker wants to keep following their various rules of thumb, because they know they'll produce the best bread. They don't know why the rules-of-thumb work; they just know that whenever they've accidentally diverged from them, they get less puffy bread.

Now, replace "baker's rules for baking bread" with e.g. "common-law rules around easements and rights-of-way in property disputes."

Something along these lines is how most modern states handled it in practice, if you look at e.g. former Warsaw Pact states.

If that was the case, we wouldn't need lawyers or court hearings. Laws are phrased vaguely on purpose because real life is far too complicated to write down every eventuality and also it's easier to build political consensus for vague laws. That's why we have courts who interpret the law based on precedent and common sense.

A succinct way to see the difference: You want your computer to do exactly what you wrote in the code and nothing else. This is not true of legislation. You want people to do anything that's not explicitly forbidden and tolerate them doing things that are technically forbidden ad long as they don't really cause too much harm, which means laws are written keeping in mind that the system has and needs slack.

Er no. The law existed long before computers did.

> Laws are phrased vaguely on purpose because real life is far too complicated to write down every eventuality and also it's easier to build political consensus for vague laws.

This doesn't discount from the code comparison at all. Anyone who has worked on a codebase for a large company knows that the feature requests never stop piling in either because the computer program will never be able to handle all the complexity of what it is trying to model either. At the end of the day, you have a function myLaw which takes four arguments, plaintiff, defendant, judge and jury. The interactions between the four and the myLaw code decide what the return value is.

> A succinct way to see the difference: You want your computer to do exactly what you wrote in the code and nothing else. This is not true of legislation. You want people to do anything that's not explicitly forbidden and tolerate them doing things that are technically forbidden as a way to introduce slack into the system.

No, because you're assuming here that the law directly controls the people. I would argue that isn't the actual purpose of the law. If this were true then there would be no crime because once a law was written, everyone would abide by it as if it had telepathic mind control and there would be no crime. Instead, people are free to ignore or read the law and then to act in concordance or discordance of their own free will. The actual purpose of the law is for evaluating the actions of people after they have done something. People are run time variables that are inserted into the law function, they are not the code themselves.

It might have been Norway though. One of these two.