I've been thinking along these lines more and more. Trying to specify exact limits and trying to account for every possible situation when making rules just encourages people to find holes and workarounds. It creates a game, a competition between the rule makers and everyone else.
When instead you state higher level values and ask for cooperation, it encourages us to work together. It's the Honor System instead of a deliberate competition between rule makers and everyone else.
Concrete example: sports
When you are playing with a group of friends and there's no referee, most everyone does their best to just play hard and follow the rules. It's not perfect, but it works for the most part because we all love the game and want to have a good time.
Once you introduce referees, the game within the game of "what can I get away with?" starts and you end up with players learning how to foul without getting caught and then players overreacting to fouls in order to make sure the rule breakers still get caught, and then it evolves into flopping to get a foul called even when there was none, and eventually people start to hate the sport altogether (see: NBA, FIFA)
Concrete example: government and police forces. Do I even need to elaborate on this one?
That's actually how EU law works! I think it's also why US companies keep getting in trouble here, they try to loophole-lawyer like at home, but it just... doesn't work that way.
I had a whole long conversation about this with another commenter a while ago if you're interested in learning more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707697
Very interesting discussion, thanks for sharing that.
India has a different system where generally speaking, it behaves more like UK/US courts (common law) over civil law.
But if Supreme Court reads fundamental rights are violated then Supreme Court can read the constitution in a similar way but Supreme Court has used it sometimes to force the government hands.
For example, when the Bhopal Gas tragedy happened where people died because of the accident (Rest in peace), instead of having individual people try to sue the govt. and fight for years with no end in sight, the supreme court used article 142 to impose single lump sum settlement and centralized compensation scheme. So it can force a govt to do something.
The Sahara-SEBI Case is even more direct when supreme court forced a company to refund amount and fast-tracked it in a more civil-law style case.
But Indian Supreme court is very slow and from my understanding, does try to use it rarely and only the Indian Supreme court can invoke article 142 and its more so done to prevent genuine gaps rather than already existing provisions
I found this whole discussion really interesting
In theory this split between common law and civil law is about who you trust more: judiciary or legislature. Civil law leaves more to interpretation for judiciary whereas common law leaves very little to interpretation. There doesn't seem to be very wide consensus on which system is necessarily better to be honest.