The hard, borderline cases that you mention are relatively rare. No matter how complicated your system of laws, these cases tend to require humans, either judges or juries, to make a careful decision.
If you have 10,000 laws rather than 10, you end up instead having to decide which of the many conflicting laws that could be applied should be applied to the situation. In marginal cases, human judgement is extremely difficult to replace.
Well, from this and another post, you seem to be concerned mainly with overlap between similar laws -- a natural result of a large and fragmented legal code. Why not prune it instead of scrapping it? Refactor instead of rewrite? Insert jwz quote.
The hard, borderline cases that you mention are relatively rare. No matter how complicated your system of laws, these cases tend to require humans, either judges or juries, to make a careful decision.
If you have 10,000 laws rather than 10, you end up instead having to decide which of the many conflicting laws that could be applied should be applied to the situation. In marginal cases, human judgement is extremely difficult to replace.