Ordered liberty requires a law that is a unified whole, not just a collection of isolated rules. The reason for this is that judges must constantly decide cases for which there is no clear, established rule that speaks directly on point. If there is no internal harmony to the law, no connection from one established rule to another, then judges have no predictable standard for deciding such cases and are left to their own arbitrary instincts. When the law consists almost entirely of statutes and regulations, drafted by many different people in a variety of rule-making bodies, inner coherence is inevitably impossible to attain. In contrast, the very manner in which common law develops gives it a tendency toward consistency.
Judges discover the common law by analogizing present cases to previously adjudicated cases.
Because exact precedents are rarely found, common-law judges must decide cases by synthesizing the results of prior cases most resembling the controversy currently at issue. In other words, common-law adjudication is based on the assumption that the rule governing one situation is to complement and even explain the rules for other situations. Rules of common law are recognized as such only because they fit well into the whole fabric of the law. Our final consideration is that common law accounts well for the complexity of society and for the fact that no single person or group of people can possibly attain enough knowledge to understand exactly how all the parts of society fit and work together. Undeniably, many of the things most valuable to us were never created by anyone in particular but developed spontaneously over time through the free input of many people.