All bills and laws should be written in plain English, understandable to anyone with a 6th grade education. They should also be completely Constitutional and cite at the beginning of every bill/law the Constitutional authority for what is intended by the bill/law, anything less should be grounds for repeal and a fair excuse for all citizens to disobey said bill/law.

The other aspect of common law is the elaboration through judicial decisionmaking of legal principles which apply to civil or criminal cases. This occurs whether or not the underlying cause of action has been codified in a statute.

I should have mentioned previously that I think that the effect of judicial elaboration on statutory criminal law has been that the statutes become elaborate to work around, anticipate, or reverse court decisions with which the legislature disagrees.

A further complicating fact is that the rise of word processing software has made it easier for judges and law clerks to write increasingly lengthy opinions. Sometimes, this occurs by cutting and pasting from other judicial opinions. In other cases, law clerks will take a “bench memo” written to guide a judge’s decision, and alter it slightly for the judge to use as a ruling memorandum. The consequence is that the judicial gloss on statutes has grown enormously in volume over the past 20 years.

My copy of the unannotated US Criminal Code (including Title 18 and selected sections of other titles) is about 1000 pages long.

While I agree that our US Criminal Code is ridiculous, I’m not quite sure how you ascribe that to our common law tradition. Common law may get somewhat complicated when you start arguing case law, but the idea is the exact opposite of what’s found in the US Criminal Code. Simply put, the whole idea of common law is that certain crimes are intuitive. You know stealing and murder are wrong so they don’t have to be codified. By contrast, there’s nothing intuitive about criminalizing the “offer, acceptance, or solicitation to influence operations of employee benefit plan,” hence we codify it (18 U.S.C. § 1954).

Given our inability to concisely codify statutory crimes in the U.S., why would you think doing away with common law and codifying those crimes as well would improve our criminal justice system?

If you would like to see transparency in the law, take a look at the French Penal Code. In a single (albeit long) web page, they provide the definition of every crime in France, plus criminal procedure and punishment laws (e.g., rehabilitation). The language (in either English, which is the translation of the web page whose link I just provided, or in French) is also remarkably simple and straightforward.

My copy of the unannotated US Criminal Code (including Title 18 and selected sections of other titles) is about 1000 pages long. When you add in the fact that French law is uniform nationally– so there are no “state” criminal codes to consider in addition to the federal one– the difference is even more enormous.

Appellate cases are a different story though you can often find some information via your state’s high court website. Also, though the information isn’t online, the libraries at all state law schools are open to the public. They should all have the regional reporters and though it may be difficult for someone who hasn’t been to law school to browse them the information is out there for free for those who care to find it.