[dragonwriter]

> The United States is on something called Common Law [1], in which courts are generally supposed to follow precedent and not make up new stuff or function as de facto legislatures.

Even while linking to Wikipedia articles, you manage to get the common law / civil law distinction almost completely backwards: the common law is a body of judge-made law resulting from judges acting as “de facto legislatures” (which is the source of the respect for precedent, as the prior decisions are themselves incorporated into law), whereas civil law is a system in which the law is strictly created by legislative bodies, and thus courts are expected to look exclusively to the acts of the legislature, and not prior court decisions.