I'm not a lawyer, I program.

My understanding is that Civil Law (most of the world excluding UK, US, AU) is like a program: you feed it a situation, it outputs a decision, every once in a while you edit it.

Common Law (UK, US) isn't really a program, but you could stretch and say it's a state machine that has been running since the country started. Every interaction sets a new precedent and changes the state. But the programming analogy falls apart because no one in the right mind would design such a program.

LLMs might actually be the best example of such a program though: Common Law is basically one long chat with an LLM, hundreds of years long.

Before LLMs came along, a Common Law system seemed to have a finite time limit before it's co-opted by wealthy people with the resources to read the whole history. Now I think maybe can push it a bit further.

But it's still a terrible program.