Earlier quoted context omitted.
The alternative to case law is that ambiguities in the statute are interpreted differently each time. Being subject to the law, I would much rather live in a system designed to automatically reduce ambiguities over time, rather than to have to wait for the legislature to have the political will and resources to address them.
The USA is a common-law jurisdiction which means that convention and "how things were always done" have outsized significance when compared to civil-law jurisdictions like much of western Europe. Civil-law jurisdictions tend to rely more on statute, but they also have legislatures that can actually get things done, rather than cultivate this bogus adversarial relationship between the people and the government wherein…
But even a more functional and productive legislature does not have the same bandwidth to look at individual ambiguities, nor the mandate to do so, thats found in the federal appellate courts. Moreover, the reliance on case law does not remove the legislature's ability to adjust the statute when they believe that case law has got things wrong.
Please correct me if I'm missing something, but I see civil-law jurisdictions as having strictly fewer resources to clarify ambiguities in the law when compared to common-law jurisdictions. Although some civil-law jurisdictions happen to also have more productive and responsive legislative and regulatory bodies, as far as I can tell, that's unrelated to their use of civil-law.