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by lywald 5301 days ago
Legitimate? Unless it's in a text of law, it's not legitimate. I could argue that he's not a judge the same way.
3 comments

Unless it's in a text of law, it's not legitimate.

This is not correct. There's always some degree of ambiguity, and as the Courts hear cases that test those ambiguities, those precedents -- known as "case law" -- effectively become part of the law, even though they're not in the text.

Very very incorrect. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_law and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law , which have the force of law but are neither statutory nor regulatory law (which I assume is what you mean by “a text of law”; arguably case law, since it is in the form of written decisions, actually is “a text of law” anyway).
Wrong. What you are describing is a Civil Law system, where written code has priority over all else. The US has a common law legal system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)