“When the world and times change, laws should change” comes from “Examining the Present” in the Lüshi Chunqiu. Both yi and yi indicate change, while yi means fitting or appropriate. The passage first says that government without laws falls into disorder, but rigidly preserving laws also creates contradiction. It then compares reform to good medicine: as illness changes, treatment must change with it.
The sentence concerns institutions and circumstances; it does not treat novelty as valuable in itself. A restrained contemporary reading is that when conditions change, we should test whether an old method still achieves its original purpose. If purpose, evidence and consequences remain unexplained, change can be arbitrary too.
https://ctext.org/lv-shi-chun-qiu/cha-jin/zh
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