The the latest post in the Cato blog makes an interesting comment claiming that there is no longer much difference between court cases and regulatory industries in how they affect society. I don’t have enough knowledge to really commit myself to whether the comment is true, but it does sound initially plausible to me.
I never bought Hayek’s argument regarding the superiority of common-law adjudication in the first place. So you have a thousand common-law judge-legislators announcing “precedent” instead of one legislature. How is that obviously superior (and how is that obviously freedom enhancing)?
There does seem to be an informational advantage in adjudication relative to legislation, if for no other reason that legislators act prescriptively while judges adjudicate a concrete case where a specific injury has (ostensibly) occurred. But that sort of fact-based adjudication occurs in civl-law systems as well.
So the precise superiority of the common law system, whether now lost or not, always escaped me.