One is following the law and the other isn't.

If the letter of the law doesn't enforce the spirit of the law, it was poorly written or it's out of date and needs to be amended.

In theory, the US system allows for those updates. In reality it's a little less clear. Currently we're absolutely moving to the fealty to the crown system and it's not great.

Any system that makes specific carve outs for anyone to not follow the letter of the law is not about enforcing the law, it's about maintaining control using arbitrary enforcement and chronyism (not sure of that spelling).

The system of workarounds for religious customs has always fascinated me. I will follow the letter of the law, because I have to. If I don't agree with the laws, I can move. If I was in a faith tradition and finding workarounds for the intent of the law, I would choose a different faith. To me it's very binary; either you are or you aren't [Religion]. Using technicalities on your deity just feels like a suckers game to make your current and any possible afterlife worse. Like God is just going to say, "oh man you really got one over on me." Makes zero sense.

> The latter have a lot of "Yes, you're technically in trouble under the guidelines the enforcement authority rules using but they're going to make an exception for you, for now" and the former have a lot of "Yes, the spirit was to block this kind of thing but the letter of the law is that you do get away with it".

The latter system is what happens if you actually have rule of law. The law says X is illegal, you did not do X, therefore you cannot be prosecuted. Meanwhile anyone caught doing X is prosecuted or it's a scandal that they're seen getting away with it.

The former is autocracy in a trench coat. Whether you're in violation of the law is irrelevant because the laws are so numerous and ambiguous that everyone is always in violation of the law and the only thing that matters is if the prosecutors want to charge you.

Sadly the US is moving more towards the "traditional" system rather than the other way around.

In the UK there is substantial use of secondary legislation. This is where Parliament authorises someone else to make laws on its behalf in some context. These powers delegated by Parliament are usually mundane but can be extreme and there's no limit to what powers Parliament can delegate. Since politicians are lazy they tend to use secondary legislation all the time. This encourages a culture of legislative sloppiness.

While the UK courts have given themselves the power to perform judicial review, there is no constitutional basis for this review and so the courts are reluctant to step on Parliament's toes because if they go too far they risk Parliament deciding that it doesn't like the courts' interference and removing their authority. This isn't a hypothetical and the courts have at times resorted to some crazy mental gymnastics to evade Parliament's attempts to prevent judicial review.

The US has a similar concept that enables federal agencies to make regulations on Congress's behalf but it's much more limited in scope due to the separation of powers and more solid position of the US Supreme Court.

First hacker culture there ever was. Hacking the words of god, to make life easier. Makes you pre-disposed to excell in science, that kind of thinking and learning..

Probably because the US was founded by the immigrants who fled because they hated the way the system worked in their original countries, and designed a system that's diametral opposed to that, for better and for worse.