Common vs. civil law 21:37 May 21, 2020
Never having practiced civil law, this is just a guess. However, the main conceptual differerence between the medieval English common law system which now governs much of the world and the Roman Law system exemplified in 1805 by the Napoleonic Code, now the Civil Code, is that common law is an accretion of legislation and interpretive court decisions by judges whereas civil law is a comprehensively written prescription designed to resolve all foreseeable issues. Judge-made common law addresses only actual individual conflicts in terms possibly useful as precedent in subsequent, imperfectly analogous situations. In theory at least, common law courts studiously avoid pronouncing law for future hypothetical cases.
So I think the engineer is saying they don't want to perhaps "declare," "prescribe," "pronounce," "enunciate" law by deviating from the preexisting Code but they must nevertheless concede that the law has evolved away from the most recently written version of the Code provisions. At least this is my common law notion of how Code practitioners would struggle to accommodate new realities. | 
peer agreement (net): +4
