I just finished a column for next Sunday's paper, arguing the negative, saying that while there must be allowances made for prudence, as a general matter the law has to be grounded in transcendental moral principles, and that the people should conform to the law. My opponent, a libertarian, will argue that yes, the law should be changed to reflect how people actually live.
This seems a perfect analogy to descriptivist-prescriptivist debates in linguistics. But it should be obvious that in both cases, the answer to the question "Should the law reflect how people actually live?" is 'no;' Rod's position is "the law should be composed in such a way to reflect how people ought to live," and the libertarian position relies very heavily on producing a good explanation of "how people actually live," which in any sort of democracy or pluralistic system I take to be an impossible task (indeed, a Mungowitz-style libertarianism would, I think, resist the very idea of aggregation implicit in creating a system of law).
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