This analogy is commonly drawn by programmers. Like many analogies it's imperfect. Law in the Common Law countries (the UK, US, Australia, Canada, NZ etc) has

This analogy is commonly drawn by programmers. Like many analogies it's imperfect. Law in the Common Law countries (the UK, US, Australia, Canada, NZ etc) has two main sources: case law and legislation. They are both the law. Case law derives its power from precedent, legislation from declaration. But they are both the law. Legislation read in isolation will not give you a correct understanding of the law. More specifically: > Unfortunately, most bodies of law have amassed a huge amount of technical debt, and nobody seems interested in solving it. Reform acts are passed all the time, often consolidating caselaw, or consolidating legislation, or both. Just as often there's a process of cleaning up the attic and finding old legislation that needs to be repealed. Where I studied law, the Law of Property Act 2000 (NT) included repeals for Acts going back as far as 1266[0]. But a legislature has limited bandwidth. Within this bandwidth there is a fat tail distribution of attention. Contentious issues frequently absorb legislative time and effort out of proportion to their size or complexity. This is not a matter of legislation-as-code, this is a matter of the economics of public choice and bargaining. > The fact that most legislators are actually terrible coders doesn't help at all either. Legislation is typically drafted by professional drafters working for the legislature. Some comes from "model acts" provided by lobbyists, these too drafted by professionals. Drafting legislation is as hard or harder than coding. There are no debugging tools, no test suites, everything is done live in production with potentially unlimited consequences. Those drafters work with immense care and often under absurd deadlines. [0] http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nt/consol_act/lopa2000198/sch4.html http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nt/consol_act/lopa200...