Part I — The Cases Before Us

The Cases Before Us

The present makes the problem visible because the cases are not settled at a safe historical distance.

In each chapter that follows, a general rule has a serious reason for existing. Parents usually should know important facts about their children. Uniform workplace rules can protect fairness and coordination. Appeals can discipline first decisions without making every case start over. Civil-rights enforcement can require institutions to see patterns that individual officials may deny or miss.

The difficulty begins when the rule meets a person, body, family, illness, file, or pattern it does not fully understand. The question is not whether rules should yield whenever a hard case appears. That would turn judgment into private power. The question is whether the institution has a disciplined way to notice when the case before it is not the case the rule imagined.

The first three chapters show judgment protecting people from rules that have overcompressed them. The fourth reverses direction. It shows why rules, records, and pattern review also protect people from local discretion. Part I begins here because legitimacy depends on holding both protections in view before the argument turns to history.