[caseyy]

Well, the laws in civil law countries that practice legal literalism are not open to interpretation. Eastern Europe, much of which is a part of the EU, is quite literalist.

The understanding is that interpreting laws leads to bias, partiality, and injustice; while following the letter of the law equally in each situation is the most just approach.

[saagarjha]

Interpreting the law literally is very easy to do in a biased way: you just pick and choose when to do it.

[oneeyedpigeon]

I don't believe that's even possible — I'd love to see an example. How do you define anything 100% literally, 100% unambiguously? You'd have to include the entire language in your definition for a start, and keep that constantly updated.

[caseyy]

Lithuanian laws are a good example. They are extremely verbose compared to most common law countries.

I lived in Lithuania for a while and at the time, there was a big national debate about how “family” should be defined in laws — what people it can and can’t include.

So yes — a lot of emphasis is put on verbose definitions in literalist legal texts. And very very verbose explanations of many edge cases, too,

I know first hand it will be very hard to read Lithuanian legal texts for someone who is not a native speaker of the language, and even for natives it’s a challenge. So you could instead google “literalist legal systems”, and I believe you’ll find at least some examples/more context in English somewhere.