[PeterisP]

And the two major alternative starting points used in practice are Roman law or Sharia law, both of which are likely even less acceptable to someone who doesn't want the baggage of English common law.

On the other hand, in the civil law systems when new countries are formed, as soon as you get the core laws passed (which takes some years of transition) you do generally make a clean start where only the new code of laws matter and everything else is discarded - you explicitly choose which parts of earlier code get included in the new laws, and that's it, old laws get pulled out only if there's a relevant dispute about some events which happened back when those old laws were in force.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

The code of Hammurabi (eye for an eye) seemed to be popular back in the day.

One must wonder if its host nation-state had survived for longer, what iteration would be out in the wild.

[throw0101a]

> The code of Hammurabi (eye for an eye) seemed to be popular back in the day.

"Eye for an eye" comes from the Book of Exodus, and it was meant not as a prescription, but as a limitation:

> The intent behind the principle was to restrict compensation to the value of the loss.[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_for_an_eye

[PeterisP]

While Book of Exodus may be a major bringer of "eye for an eye" to western culture, it is certainly not the origin of the principle. The Hammurabi code predates the events described in the book of Exodus (and thus the book of Exodus) by many centuries, and does encode "Eye for an eye" as a literal prescription (If an citizen should blind the eye of another citizen, they shall blind his eye.)

So it was also a prescription - but yes, as you say, it is also a limitation for retaliation, assigning an equivalent punishment to limit escalation of vengeance.