Your description is not consistent with history. Politics and corruption are not outsized drivers of law. Especially case law built through the courts. It’s all edge cases.
Try the example of drafting a standard apartment lease, over millions of transactions between landlords and tenants lots of edge cases emerge. So over time leases get more complicated. And then the law around interpretation and enforcement gets complicated.
> Politics and corruption are not outsized drivers of law. Especially case law built through the courts. It’s all edge cases.
Case law is full of politics. How do you think courts resolve the ambiguities? If there was an objective standard for how to do it then judges could be replaced by computer programs. Judges are used instead because rigorous and consistent application of rules would lead to outcomes that are politically inexpedient, so judges only apply the rules as written when politics fails to require something different.
> Try the example of drafting a standard apartment lease, over millions of transactions between landlords and tenants lots of edge cases emerge. So over time leases get more complicated.
This is just a facet of how contracts and lawyers work. The law creates defaults that a contractual agreement can override, so each time the law establishes a default that landlords don't like but are allowed to change, they add a new clause to the lease to turn it back the other way. What they really want is a simple one-liner that says all disputes the law allows to be resolved in favor of the landlord, will be. But politics doesn't allow them to get away with that because what they're doing would be too clear to the public, so politics requires them to achieve the result they want through an opacifying layer of complexity.
Try the example of drafting a standard apartment lease, over millions of transactions between landlords and tenants lots of edge cases emerge. So over time leases get more complicated. And then the law around interpretation and enforcement gets complicated.