Rule of Law
14th February 2017
The OFloinn makes a point.
Extreme cases are liable to arouse emotional investment and this leads to poor laws. Glanville Williams wrote, “It used to be said that ‘hard cases make bad law’—a proposition that our less pedantic age regards as doubtful.³ What is certain is that cases in which the moral indignation of the judge is aroused frequently make bad law.” (Wikipedia)
We can see this clearly in engineering where sometimes-tragic manufacturing flaws result in absurdly strict design changes because legislatures and courts (and even managers) do not distinguish between doing the right thing and doing the thing right. That is, between quality of design and quality of execution. There are times when a design change can prevent an operational error, but typically if a problem happened because an operator failed to follow a procedure, the solution is seldom a more complex and burdensome procedure.