[lmm]

> After all, when rendering their decisions, human courts are also solely refering to rules written before the fact (in my home country at least).

They don't though. Courts dream new meanings into existing laws, create new duties where none existed before, and while the extent to which they should do so is controversial, few serious people think they should avoid doing so entirely.

[groestl]

I agree with you, and IMHO that does not necessarily conflict with what I've written before. It's true that there is broad catch all logic at the top level of policies, and when deriving lower level decisions courts inherently create policy too. But I believe it's not completely unrealistic to have such functionality baked into a conflict resolution protocol for crypto as well. Although the decisions and policies it derives might not be explainable for humans.

Generally though, I use the arguments in this discussion the other way round: in convincing lawyers (German speaking lawyers that is) that the value of law is mostly in being readable by common people. And less in being unequivocal to courts. We have code for unambiguity, but in essence, code bears the same problems as complicated laws when communicating policy and what's socially accepted to society.

[piva00]

As far as I know this works very differently between Common Law and Continental Law, no? Common Law seems to be much more reliant on courts' decisions...