[SundanceKid]

I would very much be interested by the technical (historical, sociological etc) reasons the US (and UK) don't codify their legal system (ex: French Code Civil, or the German BGB) . Aren't judges too empowered since they are not bound to a written paragraph? Doesn't it make your legal system confusing with the hundreds of thousands of court decisions from hundreds of years ago, therefore outdated, unintelligible for the population?

[J Oswald]

Aren't judges too empowered since they are not bound to a written paragraph?

This is not true. At least in the United States (at both the state and federal level), the normal role of a judge in interpreting a law is to effectuate the intent of the legislature. Judicial interpretation of any given law is bound by both the text and purpose of the statute in question. Furthermore, judges are bound by the precedent set by higher courts. If a court ignores binding precedent, then it will be reversed on appeal.

Doesn't it make your legal system confusing with the hundreds of thousands of court decisions from hundreds of years ago, therefore outdated, unintelligible for the population?

Court decisions from before the 20th century have mostly been overruled or built upon by more recent precedents or statutes. Very old cases rarely come up in actual litigation unless they are particularly noteworthy for some reason - usually because they are the foundational case for some well-developed body of law.

Statutes and court decisions, regardless of which country they come from or how old they are, are unintelligible to most people. Civil law jurisdictions do not differ from common law jurisdictions in that regard.

[Prosthetic Conscience]

You might find this interesting, on the interaction between common and statute law in England:

We retain, two centuries after he wrote, a vibrant source of judge-made law, sitting alongside a vast stock of statute law, to which we add, each year, perhaps half a million words. In truth, England and Wales is a hybrid jurisdiction – as, I might add, is Scotland. We still look to the judges to develop some or all of the rules of contract, and tort, and remedies, and legal personality, and what it means to hold property on trust, and public law, and much more. Then there are some areas of law which are almost entirely statutory.

And for the most part, we have areas of law where statute sits on top of or alongside common law. Drafters and legally trained readers are used to the mental to and fro this requires. Take the Defamation Act 2013, for example. Section 1 says, “A statement is not defamatory unless its publication has caused or is likely to cause serious harm to the reputation of the claimant.” (Defamation Act 2013 s.1(1))

In order to understand that, you have to know what it means for a statement to be defamatory, and the significance of that. So while the zeal to simplify remains inspiring, the truth is that the idea of replacing the entire common law with a statutory code – and implicitly with a different judicial tradition – has not been taken up. We have neither replaced the common law altogether; nor, where we have replaced it, have we removed the judges’ responsibility for interpreting statutes and, where necessary, for developing the law.

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ ... tatutes--2

[Joe Liberty]

I would very much be interested by the technical (historical, sociological etc) reasons the US (and UK) don't codify their legal system (ex: French Code Civil, or the German BGB) .

http://uscode.house.gov/

Aren't judges too empowered since they are not bound to a written paragraph?

Well, they are bound to an extent, but each case must be weighed according to the individual circumstances. What's wrong with that? In fact I could argue that things like "mandatory minimum" laws and the infamous "three strikes" laws have removed too much judicial discretion.

[jango1985]

I don't know if I am completely misreading the question but the law is about life, life keeps happening, making new situations. The internet, computers, encryption, drones, those things didn't exist before and it would have taken some real genius to accurately predict it all and their ramifications, even in current day let alone when some of it was written.

Personally I don't like the idea of it on the principle that the chain of power is not going to involve most of the people subject to it. That's probably not gonna going to be something many people get a real say in being subjected to or not, so its no different really from oligarchy and monarchy of the past just not genetic dictatorship anymore. Which is an improvement because not all kids want to be like their parents and politics is probably not something that runs in the family more than anything else, might keep the levels of megalomania down some also.

Basically giving someone or group of people power to make the rules for everyone is a lot of power to be handing out. And I can tell you in all honestly if I was given that power I would make sure that what I want to do, and my ways of doing things were not illegal, and that the things I hate would tend to become illegal.

I would try make sure the rules I wrote at least didn't disfavor me. Any religion is going to promise you lots of rewards for doing what it tells you in a afterlife so every priest out there thinks they might be getting payday when they die, whether they are gonna get that pay day I don't know. No charity is done without someone believing they might benefit somehow only difference is they aren't chasing a monetary gain. Pretty much the entire theory of pure capitalism only I don't trust the money bean counters to get all the counts otherwise I wouldn't even care.

[Hong Wu]

People in the US and UK have legislated almost everything by now. There's few differences left between common and civil law systems. And the remaining common law stuff tends to have been indexed electronically so that it's almost like a code in of itself.