I'd like to add nuance: tradition seems to oftentimes be a mix between actual solutions to problems, and legacy cruft that can be safely removed without undoing

I'd like to add nuance: tradition seems to oftentimes be a mix between actual solutions to problems, and legacy cruft that can be safely removed without undoing the fix to the problem. Large, active codebases have to be occasionally refactored to keep them understandable, and this refactoring can often be done without a loss of functionality - why would the law (or tradition) be different? In particular, it feels like much of the legal system is a bunch of hacks grafted onto existing (oftentimes much older) laws, and that there's an opportunity to rewrite the laws and merge the hacks in to form a cohesive whole.