[safety1st]

That's not exactly how things work, though. Laws aren't deterministic like a computer program. They can be drafted broadly, poorly, incompletely, or simply not take into account things that didn't exist when the law was written.

It's the job of the judiciary to interpret the laws in these situations, and part of that is looking at the spirit of the law and create case law which may alter the powers of government.

This is very much part of the Western tradition of common law, as is a vigorous discussion over how far the judiciary should be able to go. It's fair to say popular sentiment has drifted in a libertine direction over the last 50 years, but the debate is far from settled.

(In fact we can speculate with some reliability about what the future may hold: via one mechanism or another, including the judiciary, governments usually trend more libertine in times of peace and more authoritarian in times of crisis.)

[bjornsing]

I don’t think you can equate common law and Western tradition. Large parts of what I would call The Western world has the civil law system.

[safety1st]

Yes you're right - just meant to say that common law is one of the major Western legal traditions, and worded it awkwardly

[darkwater]

> They can be drafted broadly, poorly, incompletely, or simply not take into account things that didn't exist when the law was written.

Computer programs suffer all of this as well :)

[abigail95]

common law is very much the minority of western law traditions