[giobox]

There's one unifying feature of all common law legal systems - judges will publicly almost always proclaim they do not create law, largely because simple prima facie interpretations of most western constitutions say "the legislature makes the laws, the court enforces them", and the existence of judge made law has always had an uneasy relationship with this.

The reality in Common Law legal systems is nothing like this, and judge made law through interpretation and application of precedent is a very real thing, even in the USA. As a particularly blunt example, in some parts of the UK such as Scotland, the traditional common law crimes such as murder/theft etc aren't even defined in primary legislation ("laws"), and exist solely as judge made and applied creations through decades of precedent. Even where there exists primary legislation, the scope of judicial interpretation gives a great deal of freedom to judges to establish precedents that the drafters might not have foreseen or intended.

Heck even the definition of the term "Common Law" is normally interpreted to mean "Case Law" as developed by judges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law

[John23832]

I'm not trying to be condescending, but you should probably include a US centric example when asserting how the US works. The Scottish example is irrelevant, as it applies to Scotland, not the US. Also, if you try to relate Scotland and the US under the umbrella of the term "Common Law", but then say that that term has it's own interpretive meaning, you've loosened the association to the point where you can't strictly say that the Scottish and US systems are the same...

Also, as I've seen in other comments, we're going to get on the merry-go-round of defining "create law".