The Over-Reliance on Rules and Laws

Paper Summary:

This paper, which bases its argument on "The Death of Common Sense" by Philip K. Howard, contends that the dispensation of justice requires the understanding and practice of the spirit of the law. The author relates that the root of the system is the rationalist movement of the 1960s, which favored statutory law, as it was believed to be more consistent and fair. The paper concludes that the worst malaise of a system that follows the letter and not the spirit of the law is the fear syndrome that it creates, which undermines the very promise of justice to create security, safety, and overall social well-being.

From the Paper:

"Bureaucracies, as is widely acknowledged, usually lead to the stifling of good ideas, innovation, initiative and most important a loss of perspective. Indeed, experience has shown again and again that bureaucracies usually miss the wood for the trees and, in doing so, defeat the larger purpose for which they were set up in the first place. Howard ably demonstrates this very point when he cites the example of Mother Teresa's nuns of the Missionaries of Charity having to perforce abandon their plans to convert two abandoned buildings into homeless shelters in New York City because of the bureaucratic insistence of the city's building code that the nuns would have to install a lift (Howard, 3-5). The irony of the situation lies in the fact that the nuns were on a mission to carry out an act of social justice. The city of New York itself had offered the nuns the two buildings at the princely cost of $ 1 each, recognizing the objective of social justice; but the statutory law that was meant to ensure social justice through the protection of human rights would not permit it! This, then, is a clear case where the "letter" of the law weighed far more heavily than its spirit."

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