Rules In The Legal Process Research Paper

To distinguish rules from principles, legal scholars emphasize the specificity and binding quality of legal rules. Thus, Lawrence Friedman (1975, p. 26) defines a legal rule as ‘a proposition of law couched in general terms,’ consisting of a statement of facts and a statement of the legal consequences which follow from those facts, for example, ‘Any person who drives a motor vehicle through a red light is guilty of a violation and shall be fined $50.’ Social scientists, on the other hand, focus on the distinction between legal rules and customary rules or social norms. Thus Max Weber defined legal rules as norms which have some likelihood of being enforced coercively by an officially-designated staff of legal officials (Rheinstein 1954, pp. 1vi, 14–15), a definition that emphasizes the political origin of legal rules and the contingencies surrounding their actual use.

1. Types Of Legal Rules

Legal rules can be unwritten, as in preliterate societies (Hoebel 1964), or written and published, as in larger, literate political systems. Some legal rules are specific, such as those which prohibit driving over 60 miles per hour, while others, such as those that impose liability for accidents caused by driving ‘unreasonably dangerously,’ articulate vague standards. Highway speed limits are primary rules, designed to regulate ordinary citizens and businesses. Secondary rules, in contrast, guide the making and application of primary rules by government officials and judges (Hart 1961). Thus secondary rules—often stated in constitutions as well as in statutes—prescribe which officials have authority to make speed laws (and other laws) for a particular territory, who has authority to enforce them, who has authority to adjudicate disputes about their proper application, and who has authority to build the roads and install traffic lights. Other secondary rules govern the making of rules by legislatures, while ‘procedural rules’ govern the process of litigation and adjudication. In political systems that value the rule of law, one fundamental secondary rule is that legal officials must be guided in their decisions and actions by preexisting, publicly accessible primary and secondary rules.

From a sociolegal perspective, it is useful to distinguish ‘high consensus’ legal rules (such as statutes condemning theft or breach of contract) from rules that are politically, morally, or economically controversial. Controversial rules are generally much harder to enforce than high consensus rules, and they pose more difficult moral dilemmas for officials and judges who are expected to enforce them.

2. The Political, Social, And Institutional Functions Of Legal Rules

The most obvious function of legal rules is to serve justice, increasing the likelihood that different decision-makers will treat like cases alike. Political scientists, however, emphasize the political control function of legal rules (Farber and Frickey 1991): political authorities entrench their policy choices in statutes and administrative rules to increase the odds that those policies will be implemented uniformly by far-flung bureaucrats, law enforcement officials, and judges. For political authorities, legal rules also serve a broader communicative function, informing citizens and businesses about their obligations and the decisions they might expect from government administrators, law enforcers, and judges. A tax code provides a familiar example. In consequence, legal rules often are said to have a constitutive function, shaping citizens’ conceptions about what is fair, permissible, and proper (Sarat and Kearns 1993, Edelman and Suchman 1997, pp. 503–6, Kagan and Skolnick 1993).

By imposing controls on administrative officials, police, and judges, legal rules tend to serve a useful function for the citizenry: restraining official power, at least in the sense of making it more predictable. Published legal rules provide criteria for holding officials accountable via judicial review or public criticism. For this reason, legal rules, when combined with a credible governmental commitment to adhere to them, serve yet another function: adding legitimacy to governmental and judicial authority—which helps explain their ubiquity in the governance of nationstates. To Karl Marx and to contemporary ‘critical legal theorists’ (Kennedy 1997, Kairys 1982), this legitimating function has an ominous side, shrouding repressive policies (and, one might add, nonrepressive policies) and coercive penalties in the language of neutrality and restraint of power.

In contemporary democratic countries, legal rules are not infrequently remade in response to popular political movements, litigation by public interest law firms, and electoral competition. Hence they have still another function: protecting individual rights. Partly because legal rules lend a graspable concreteness to general ideals and notions of justice, ordinary citizens can brandish them as shields and swords against government officials, businesses, and fellow citizens, both in and outside of court. This is the function referred to by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides in The Suppliant Women when he has Theseus praise the development of written codes of law:

Once written laws exist

People of few resources and the rich

Both have the same recourse to justice. Now

A man of means, if badly spoken of,

Will have no better standing than the weak;

And if the less is in the right, he wins

Against the great.

Many sociolegal scholars would argue that Euripides praised written legal rules too fulsomely. For as rules accumulate within a legal system, acquiring complicated subsections and qualifying clauses, they make the legal process so complex that it becomes inaccessible unless one can afford a lawyer. Rather than guaranteeing equality, therefore, contemporary legal systems tend to provide an advantage to sophisticated, better-financed litigants (Galanter 1974). Many sociolegal scholars might have Thrasymachus (the legal cynic of Plato’s Dialogues) respond to Theseus by saying something like this:

All written laws are parchment words

Whose import shifts in each man’s mind.

Thus Justice is tossed this way and that from

Judge to judge, and advocates with clever minds

Oft bend the law to serve their wealthy friends.

After communist Revolutions in Russia and Cuba, new regimes established ‘people’s courts’ in which lay judges, freed from ‘bourgeois’ legal rules, were to ‘do justice’ based on the community’s sense of fairness and social good. But the unhappy experience of ‘socialist justice’ (Markovits 1986, Hendley 1996, Krygier 1990) reminds us that written legal rules have an important political function: preserving judicial autonomy and blunting the risk of tyranny. Moreover, the ‘peoples’ courts’ experience suggests that Theseus was probably more correct than Thrasymachus. Except in homogenous, slow-changing societies, an adjudicatory system based on written legal rules, however imperfect, is likely to approach predictability and even-handedness more closely than systems that eschew fixed rules.

Finally, legal rules enhance the efficiency of legal processes. When legal rules are clear and predictably applied, they become weighty ‘bargaining chips’ in negotiating settlements before or during litigation (Mnookin and Kornhauser 1979) and hence most disputes can be resolved without adjudication, while litigation is more costly when legal predictability declines (Priest 1993).

3. The Dilemma Of Rules And Discretion

Because human activity is varied and changing, legal rule-makers suffer from relative ignorance of fact and indeterminacy of aim (Hart 1961, p. 125). Rules, therefore, are often underinclusive and often overinclusive—that is, covering activities that are irrelevant or marginal to the primary evil that the rule-makers wished to deal with. Thus, if a motor vehicle code states ‘Any person who drives a motor vehicle through a red light is guilty of a violation and shall be fined $50,’ it ostensibly compels punishment of a motorist who proceeds carefully through a malfunctioning traffic light which is stuck on red, or an ambulance driver rushing a patient to the hospital (Goffman 1971 p. 102). To apply the rule in such cases is disparaged as legalism (Friedman 1975, pp. 247–8, Nonet and Selznick 1978). Rule-based decision-making can lead to legalism because rules, in their quest for neutrality, often disregard individual litigants’ special attributes and circumstances; this makes it easier for officials to apply law’s coercive powers, but blunts their sensitivity to justice claims not embodied in the written rules (Noonan 1976).

Many governments seek to prevent the anger generated by legalism by granting legal officials some discretion to make exceptions. American criminal prosecutors, for example, can generally decline to prosecute violations of the law ‘in the interests of justice.’ Juries, by virtue of the secrecy of their deliberations, can decline to convict when they feel justice requires it (Kadish and Kadish 1973). Another antidote for legalism is to substitute general standards for very specific rules; for example, requiring custody decisions to be based on ‘the best interests’ of the particular child, taking all relevant facts and considerations into account. Yet granting scores of frontline decision-makers discretion to suspend rules or use their own judgement in implementing vague standards recreates the risk that legal rules were invented to reduce; that is, decisions that vary across different individual decision-makers or erode official policies.

Most legal institutions, therefore, employ a mix of rule and discretion (Mashaw 1983). Some, such as tax collection agencies, may be instructed to emphasize rule-based decision-making, while others, such as juvenile courts or patent offices, may be allowed to rely on experienced legal decision-makers to apply general standards sensibly and consistently. Generally, an institution’s legal rules are more prescriptive when lawmakers and politically potent interest groups do not trust it to make acceptable decisions. Thus American regulatory statutes, regulations, and permits often contain more prescriptive legal rules than their Western European counterparts (Rubin 1997, Kagan and Axelrad 2000, Rose-Ackerman 1995, Vogel 1986).

4. Can Legal Rules ‘Decide Cases?’

Beginning with the American ‘legal realists’ of the 1920s and 1930s (Ackerman 1974, White 1972, Twining 1973), some scholars have contested the assumption that judges can be ‘bound’ by pre-existing legal rules. In political science, adherents to the ‘attitudinal model’ hold that each judge’s own political values are the best predictors of individual decisions (Rowland and Carp 1983, Spaeth and Segal 1999). More fundamentally, legal philosophers refer to the ‘indeterminacy’ of legal rules, arguing that no matter how long one stares at the words of a constitutional bill of rights, a statute, or a set of judicial precedents, the words alone cannot determine which of two conflicting interpretations (and legal outcomes) in a particular case is ‘correct.’ Moreover, in complex legal systems, it is argued, decision-makers inevitably use their own judgment in deciding which of many rules or precedents ‘applies’ to a case. The implication is that all legal decisions are policy decisions, rationalized only after the fact by reference to one particular rule or rule interpretation.

Other scholars, however, argue that within any particular legal institution—a national judiciary, an administrative agency—legal professionals reduce in-determinacy by assigning mutually understood meanings to the rules they work with. They learn to do so through social interaction: in law school classes and legal argument; by explaining and defending their rule interpretations to others; by absorbing institutionspecific conventions concerning the purpose of particular rules; and interaction with senior officials or higher authorities who resolve disputes about particular cases. Conventional methods of rule application become part of the socially constructed role of ‘judge,’ ‘regulatory inspector,’ or ‘police officer.’ Legal officials are socialized to regard adherence to their institutions’ processes or rule interpretations as obligatory, as essential to their legitimacy as power wielders and their identity as legal professionals (Fuller 1958, Dworkin 1967, Kagan 1978, pp. 88–90, Feeley and Rubin, 1998, p. 338, Kennedy 1997). Indeed, in complex, pluralistic societies, legal officials often find adherence to rules a comforting practice, relieving them of the sense of personal responsibility for decisions which disappoint claimants or impose harsh penalties. Legal officials who stray from their institution’s conventions learn that their decisions can be criticized or reversed; thus even judges who wish to maximize their policy preferences must act strategically, avoiding decisions that cannot be linked to plausible interpretations of existing rules (Epstein and Knight 1998).

Conventional rule interpretations do not dictate the result in every case, or totally suppress the individual decision-maker’s inclination to decide each case as the decision-maker personally thinks best, but they substantially restrain those impulses. The amount of constraint depends on the degree of homogeneity and hierarchical supervision in particular legal institutions, and on whether the legal rule in question is highly specific (as in highway speed limits) or is complex, requiring the weighing of many facts (as in a standard demanding payment of ‘compensation’ for accidents caused by ‘negligent’ driving). Yet even in the US Courts of Appeals, where politically appointed Republican and Democratic judges usually divide on party lines in the 20 percent of cases that generate dissenting opinions, in the other 80 percent judges with different political preferences agree on which legal rules and precedents are controlling (Gottschall 1986). A stark illustration of the constraining effect of ‘interpretive communities’ and socially constructed judicial roles is provided by Cover’s (1975) account of American judges in Northern states in the 1850s; they returned escaped slaves to Southern ‘slave-catchers,’ notwithstanding the judges’ (and their communities’) moral opposition to slavery, because a recently enacted federal statute seemed so clearly to require that painful action.

5. Styles Of Rule Application

For many judges and administrative officials, decision-making is a two-step process: the decision-maker first ‘looks backwards’ to pre-existing rules to discern what they seem to require, but then ‘looks forward’ to assess the consequences of the rule-based decision in terms of the decision-maker’s understanding of fairness or good public policy (Cardozo 1921, pp. 19–25, Wasserstrom 1961, Kagan 1978). Even if he feels the rule-based decision would not ‘make sense,’ he might nevertheless feel bound to follow the rule; that would be a legalistic decision-making style. In another style—unauthorized discretion—decision-makers ignore the rule and follow their own judgment (Kagan, 1978, p. 93). A third style, retreatism, is to temporize, push the parties to settle the dispute, or find other ways of avoiding hard decisions. Finally, in what has been called legal policymaking, the legal decision-maker reinterprets the pre-existing rule, adopting innovative readings or principled exceptions which support the preferred outcome (Feeley and Rubin 1998).

Which of these four modes of rule application predominate in a legal institution is influenced by the political system and the legal tradition in which it operates. Common law systems appear to allow judges more scope for creative rule interpretation than Western European judiciaries, which are more closely bound by statutory codes and legal treatises (Damaska 1986). Yet judicial policymaking does occur in civil law judiciaries, such as France’s (Lasser 1995), and common law judges in Great Britain tend to feel more tightly bound by existing precedents than their counterparts in the United States—partly because American legal training encourages a more policy oriented mode of legal reasoning, and partly because the fragmentation of lawmaking power in the United States makes judges less vulnerable to prompt ‘overrides’ by the legislature than are judges in parliamentary systems (Atiyah and Summers 1987, Damaska 1990).

Rule application styles also vary across legal institutions in the same legal system. Variations in local political culture produce different rule enforcement styles in different police departments (Wilson 1968), criminal courts (Levin 1972), and regulatory agencies (Hutter 1988). Variations in rule application also arise from the personality, role conceptions, and political commitments of individual decision-makers; from the skill and persistence with which particular parties or their legal advocates present their arguments; and from the likelihood that the decision will be reported in the news media or subjected to professional review and criticism. US Court of Appeals judges are less likely to decide cases on the basis of their political values when they serve on panels with judges from another political party (Cross and Tiller 1998). Regulatory agencies tend to enforce rules legalistically when they are subjected to public criticism for perceived laxity (Bardach and Kagan 1982) and to adopt a retreatist style when potential complainants remain silent or violators enjoy the backing of political authorities (Gunningham 1987). Legal officials are more likely to bend the rules when they confront individual subject face to face, as in ‘streetcorner bureaucracies’ (Lipsky 1980) than when decision-making is based on paper dossiers or occurs in highly formal settings (Kagan 1978, p. 152). Overall, the way that legal rules are employed is shaped by the interaction of a legal institution’s political environment, its clientele, its legal culture, and its mode of recruiting, training, and evaluating its personnel.

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