That's why we have judges (and why we should preserve the judiciary rather than undermining it with mandatory sentencing laws): to deal with the corner cases.

That's why we have judges (and why we should preserve the judiciary rather than undermining it with mandatory sentencing laws): to deal with the corner cases. The law could be kept simple and judges be trusted to deal with the complex corner cases. Having said that, I guess all that happens is statutory law remains simple, but case law grows more complex as the body of judicial decisions grows? What we seem to be missing is a "refactoring" process to periodically rewrite statutory law to replace bloat in case law with a more otimised statute. Like coders, politicians prefer to work on shiny new features than maintaining existing features?