Re: Blizzard Sued By South Carolina Inmate
First, that's a criminal code. There is more to law than crime.
Second, it's the crime of child abuse you've linked to, not the tort of negligence. It's not surprising that there's a statute on child abuse because there was probably no such thing in common law.
Third, if you read carefully, the language used to formulate components of the statute is drawn from ancient common law. If anything, you've demonstrated that judges write laws of their own and statutes, and that legislators merely clarify and interpret the common law.
Fourth, did you try searching for negligence? EDIT: Or better yet, let's bring it back to square one? Does the plaintiff in our original case allege Blizzard has violated any statute?
Finally, did I not say that there are surely statutes than people can dredge up that duplicate, modify or otherwise relate to judge-made law? You'll find that the behavior those statutes prohibit has been against the law for a lot longer than those statutes have been in existence. One of the legislatures jobs is to reign in the courts when they start interpreting the common laws too weirdly (but of course, the whole reason the legislature is compelled to do this is because judges have a lot of power to make the law). There might be a particularly odious decision that prompts the legislature to set in stone exactly what the elements of some such common law tort are and what they are not. Indeed, there's probably a slow conversion going on in our legal system from common, judge-made laws to statutes. But this conversion is far from complete, and even when it is, the original authors of all those laws will have been judges.
