Common law directly changes law on the books
Atkinson 7, Ruden, McClosky, Smith, Schuster & Russell, Professor of Law, Florida State University. (Rob, Fall 2007, ARTICLE: The Low Road to Cy Pres Reform: Principled Practice to Remove Dead Hand Control of Charitable Assets, 58 Case W. Res. 97, 106. Lexis accessed online via KU libraries)
Think of this as the High Road to legal reform. This is reform at the wholesale, rather than retail, level; it aims at direct change in the law on the books, either the codified law of legislation or the common law of judicial precedents. Such reform may, of course, be incremental, rather than radical: small amendments to this code provision or that, rather than sweeping re-codifications; gradual erosion or extension of an existing line of cases, as opposed to reversals of long-standing doctrines and precedents. But, be its progress evolutionary or cataclysmic, this kind of reform is always explicit; if not "on the books" then at least discoverable in the books. This is very much the path to reform that I recommended in my early piece on dead hand control.