In praise of Common Law

It's true that there's no absolute, platonic, abstraction of
jurisprudence to appeal to. This doesn't, though, mean that it is 'all
relative' or that justice (as opposed to law) can be arrived at only
by some sort of loose agreement.

We're an animal (and there are others) that has evolved a strong moral
sense. We can distinguish fair from unfair and right from wrong. This
sense does not, of course, mean that everybody behaves morally, all
the time; even ants in an ant colony sometimes rebel.

It does, though, mean that we can identify the clear, constant bases
of justice. There's a long historical record from which the essential
matters can be deduced. This is the basis of the soundest form of law,
Common Law, the gradually accreted body of a multitude of small
judgements, taken as precedents, that embodies our internal moral
system, particularly with its exceptions, contradictions and evolved
attitudes to, for example, the relative power of monarchs to ordinary
people, and the legitimacy of torture, execution and arbitrary
detention.

Unfortunately, where common law has been strongest, there's been
something of a conspiracy of politicians [the correct term for a
collection of the creatures, I believe] to replace this with the badly
drafted, idiot inspired, bloated corpus of legislation.

This erosion of an essentially sound system by an essentially foolish
one, has led to the decline in the respect for law that properly
attends such a decline in the essential requirements for respect -
justice, fairness and impartiality. This, in turn, has led to a
decline in justice, which, in turn, as a simple consequence, has led
to an increase in crime.