Excessive legal rigidity aimed at mistrust produces misgovernment

Evidence

Congress has shaped environmental laws in a way that “assumes they will not be administered fairly,” he complained last week. By allowing the E.P.A. too little discretion, the laws stifle progress in protecting the environment… . Inflexible laws serve no one’s long-run interest. Scientific unknowns and changing technology make it impossible to write good prescriptive environmental law. Mr. Ruckelshaus is right in principle: with more discretion, the Administrator could protect the environment in more rational ways. For that to happen, industry and environmentalists will have to stop demanding that Congress write laws leaving E.P.A. no room for judgment… It will take time for any administrator to earn the trust that Mr. Ruckelshaus commands, but to deny flexibility is to step from mistrust to misgovernment. — Shapiro, Susan P., The Social Control of Impersonal Trust, 131

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that rules designed to constrain untrusted administrators backfire into harmful inflexibility — worth chasing how this generalizes across contexts like AI governance.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ framing of moral panics and to modern debates over legislative overreach and agency discretion. — connects to: Political subjection commits citizens to acts they cannot foresee or control; Literal application of legal rules sometimes produces absurd against-purpose outcomes — Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like a Lawyer, 284; Of course the suggestion that we stop talking about ‘the law’ and ‘legal obligation’ is mostly bluff. These concepts are too deeply cemented into the structure of our political practices-they cannot be given up like cigarettes or hats. Some of the nominalists have half-admitted this and said that the myths they condemn should be thought of as Platonic myths and retained to seduce the masses into order. This is perhaps not so cynical a suggestion as it seems; perhaps it is a covert hedging of a dubious bet. (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Political subjection commits citizens to acts they cannot foresee or control #qualifies (0.75)
• Of course the suggestion that we stop talking about ‘the law’ and ‘legal obligation’ is mostly bluff. These concepts are too deeply cemented into the structure of our political practices-they… #responds-to (0.75)
• Literal application of legal rules sometimes produces absurd against-purpose outcomes #qualifies (0.72) — Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like a Lawyer, 284