Like all bureaucratic processes, Bureaucratic Legalism is generally slow, cumbersome, expensive, inflexible, and over-centralized. In fact, if you think about most of the moral conflicts that arise between humans day to day, Bureaucratic Legalism is unsuitable for the vast majority of them. Worse, Bureaucratic Legalism has trouble stopping itself from sliding toward excess. Where it sees no existing formal rules, it strives to make some. Where it sees existing rules applied sporadically or inconsistently or hypocritically, it strives for uniformity and consistency.
Squirt guns are guns and therefore violate weapons policies.
But Bureaucratic Legalism, like all outcome-blind bureaucratic ideologies, pushes inexorably toward extremes. To Bureaucratic Legalism, those sorts of rules are intolerable. Legalists, if they notice Hidden Law at all, sometimes say they are merely supplementing it. Often, however, their intrusion is crippling. Formal Law tends to block the cooperation and reconciliation that are essential to Hidden Law.