Using the Rules

Nonetheless, my aversion from breaking rules, instinctual within me since at least my Tiffany’s Table Manners days, has been weakening. After nearly a year of studying rule ambiguities, and a semester of thinking about legal ideas creatively, I find my thoughts focus on the purposes laws serve. Why do we need the formalism of bright line rules of etiquette? We’ve challenged the formal classroom style in Eben’s class in listening to music, being on a first name basis with each other and Eben, using wiki threads to continue class discussions, abandoning the blind grading policy, etc. But many of the ways we broke the rules with Eben were conscious decisions on his or both our parts to run class differently. So then we naturally created new rules when breaking old ones. Still I think there was great benefit to this approach, because we valued the function of rules instead of blindly following them. The rules we created from a default starting point became useful, as thoughtfully-adopted choices of behavior facilitating a common goal.