The truth of the matter is, that written law, is more uncertain than judge made law, the common law. And the reason for that, is, it is simpler to change written law than the common law. Common law is a slow moving, evolutionary sort of thing; it is not under the command of any single generation. As experience has proven, anyone of us can go to bed one night with one set of legislative laws and wake up next morning with an entirely different set. One set of laws are passed to cure a perceived problem. After some time, assuming the problem has been relieved (often there is no effect, indeed the problem to be got at can become even worse on account of the legislation) other problems are brought on directly related to the implementation of the "curing" legislation. So, more legislation is rushed in to fix the additional problems. And so, it is not unusual to see certain legislation to be written and rewritten over and over. This is a separate and inherent problem: the jerkiness in legislation. Judges, on the whole, are scholarly individuals who are interested in ascertaining things rather than, like legislators, changing things. So too, unlike legislators, judges cannot easily enact arbitrary rules of their own; we needn't expect sudden laws from judges as we have come to expect from legislators with their wide ranging and imperious manner.

Walter Bagehot, that much respected English legal writer, wrote about this inherent jerkiness in legislation:

"The manner of our legislation is indeed detestable, and the machinery for settling that manner odious. A committee of the whole House, dealing, or attempting to deal, with the elaborate clauses of a long Bill, is a wretched specimen of severe but misplaced labour. It is sure to wedge some clause into the Act, such as that which the judge said 'seemed to have fallen by itself, perhaps, from heaven, into the mind of the legislature', so little had it to do with anything on either side or around it. At such times government by a public meeting displays its inherent defects, and is little restrained by its necessary checks."10