Deniz Selman wrote:her seyin tuafi ve zoru bizde
Deniz cok sikayet etmemek lazim aslinda. Bunun tadi da baska. Buna arabesk kuralsizlik denebilir. Arabesk kismi olmasa kurallari gevsetmek iyidir aslinda. Gecende "The Future of the Internet - and how to stop it" (Internet'in gelecegi - ve nasil engellenebilir) adinda bir kitap okuyordum. Su asagidaki ilginc paragraflar dikkatimi cekti (uzun oldugu icin cevirmeye usendim simdi). Kurallar yerine standartlar kullanilmali diyor. Bizim de artik darbelerden dolayi mi dersin, Osmanli mirasi mi dersin bilemem ama kurallardan kacma gibi bir huyumuz var. Iyi bir huy ama kurallarin yerine bazi standartlar oturmamis ise kaos yasaniyor o zaman.
(Kaynagini verdigime gore sitenin basi telif hakkiyla belaya girmez herhalde asagidakileri kitaptan koplayaladigim icin. Sayfa 127. Bu arada belirteyim, her paragrafda soylenene katilmiyorum elbette ama deneyin kendisi ilginc.)
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The Dutch city of Drachten has undertaken an unusual experiment in traffic management. The roads serving forty-five thousand people are “verkeersbordvrij”: free of nearly all road signs. Drachten is one of several European test sites for a traffic planning approach called “unsafe is safe.”(1) The city has removed its traffic signs, parking meters, and even parking spaces. The only rules are that drivers should yield to those on their right at an intersection, and that parked cars blocking others will be towed.
The result so far is counterintuitive: a dramatic improvement in vehicular safety. Without signs to obey mechanically (or, as studies have shown, disobey seventy percent of the time(2)), people are forced to drive more mindfully—operating their cars with more care and attention to the surrounding circumstances. They communicate more with pedestrians, bicyclists, and other drivers using hand signals and eye contact. They see other drivers rather than other cars. In an article describing the expansion of the experiment to a number of other European cities, including London’s Kensington neighborhood, traffic expert Hans Monderman told Germany’s Der Spiegel, “The many rules 127 strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We’re losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior. The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility dwindles.”(3)
Law has long recognized the di fference between rules and standards—between very precise boundaries like a speed limit and the much vaguer admonishment characteristic of negligence law that warns individuals simply to “act reasonably.” There are well-known tradeoffs between these approaches.(4) Rules are less subject to ambiguity and, if crafted well, inform people exactly what they can do, even if individual situations may render the rule impractical or, worse, dangerous. Standards allow people to tailor their actions to a particular situation. Yet they also rely on the good judgment of often self-interested actors—or on little-constrained second-guessing of a jury or judge that later decrees whether someone’s actions were unreasonable. A small lesson of the verkeersbordvrij experiment is that standards can work better than rules in unexpected contexts. A larger lesson has to do with the traffic expert’s claim about law and human behavior: the more we are regulated, the more we may choose to hew only and exactly to the regulation or, more precisely, to what we can get away with when the regulation is not perfectly enforced. When we face heavy regulation, we see and shape our behavior more in relation to reward and punishment by an arbitrary external authority, than because of a commitment to the kind of world our actions can help bring about.(5) This observation is less about the difference between rules and standards than it is about the source of mandates: some may come from a process that a person views as alien, while others arise from a process in which the person takes an active part. When the certainty of authority-sourced reward and punishment is lessened, we might predict two opposing results. The first is chaos: remove security guards and stores will be looted. The second is basic order maintained, as people choose to respect particular limits in the absence of enforcement. Such acting to reinforce a social fabric may still be due to a form of self-interest—game and norm theorists offer reasons why people help one another in terms that draw on longer-term mutual self-interest(6)—but it may also be because people have genuinely decided to treat others’ interests as their own.(7) This might be because people feel a part of the process that brought about a shared mandate—even if compliance is not rigorously monitored. Honor codes, or students’ pledges not to engage in academically dishonest behavior, can apparently result in lower rates of self-reported cheating.(8) Thus, without the traffic sign equivalent of pages of rules and regulations, students who apprentice to generalized codes of honor may be prone to higher levels of honesty in academic work—and benefit from a greater sense of camaraderie grounded in shared values.
1. See Matthias Schulz, Controlled Chaos: European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs, SPIEGEL ONLINE INT’L, Nov. 16, 2006,
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/ 0,1518,448747,00.html.
2. In the United States, studies by the Federal Highway Tra ffic Safety Administration (FTSA) have shown that motorists disobey speed limits on non-interstates 70 percent of the time. Interview with Earl Hardy, Speeding Expert, Nat’l Highway Traffic Safety Admin., and Elizabeth Alicandri, Dir. of Office of Safety Programs, Fed. Highway Admin., WASHINGTONPOST.COM (Mar. 30, 2006),
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006 /03/23/DI2006032301185.html.
3. Schulz, supra note 1.
4. For a discussion of the differences between rules and standards, see, for example, Alan K. Chen, The Ultimate Standard: Qualified Immunity in the Age of Constitutional Balancing Tests, 81 IOWA L. REV. 261, 266 –70 (1995); Wilson Huhn, The Stages of Legal Reasoning: Formalism, Analogy, and Realism, 48 VILL. L. REV. 305, 377–79 (2003); Louis Kaplow, Rules Versus Standards: An Economic Analysis, 42 DUKE L.J. 557 (1992); Russell B. Korobkin, Behavioral Analysis and Legal Form: Rules vs. Standards Revisited, 79 OR. L. REV. 23, 29 – 31 (2000); Larry Lessig, Reading the Constitution in Cyberspace, 45 EMORY L.J. 869, 896 – 97 (1996) (arguing that software code can act as a societal constraint); Joel R. Reidenberg, Governing Networks and Rule-Making in Cyberspace, 45 EMORY L.J. 911, 917–18, 927–28 (1996) (discussing the role and establishment of information policy default rules); Joel R. Reidenberg, Rules of the Road for Global Electronic Highways: Merging the Trade and Technical Paradigms, 6 HARV. J.L. & TECH. 287, 301– 04 (1993); Antonin Scalia, The Rule of Law as a Law of Rules, 56 U. CHI. L. REV. 1175, 1176 (1989) (discussing how rules are more consistent with democracy than standards); Frederick Schauer, Rules and the Rule of Law, 14 HARV. J.L. & PUB. POL’Y 645, 650 – 51, 658 (1991) (discussing legal realist arguments regarding the distinction between rules and standards); Pierre J. Schlag, Rules and Standards, 33 UCLA L. REV. 379 (1985) (discussing whether there is a coherent distinction between rules and standards); Cass R. Sunstein, Problems with Rules, 83 CAL. L. REV. 953, 963 – 64 (1995).
5. See, e.g., LAWRENCE KOHLBERG, FROM IS TO OUGHT: HOW TO COMMIT THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY AND GET AWAY WITH IT IN THE STUDY OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT (1971); Lawrence Kohlberg, Moral Stages and Moralization: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach, in MORAL DEVELOPMENT AND BEHAVIOR: THEORY, RESEARCH AND SOCIAL ISSUES (T. Lickona ed., 1976); Lawrence Kohlberg, The Claim to Moral Adequacy of a Highest Stage of Moral Judgment, 70 J. PHIL. 630, 630 – 46 (1973).
6. See generally ROBERT AXELROD, THE EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION (1984); ROBERT ELLICKSON, ORDER WITHOUT LAW (1991); Wikipedia, Prisoner’s Dilemma,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma (as of June 1, 2007, 11:00 GMT).
7. Law-and-order conservatives embrace such an idea when they argue that social programs should be largely funded by the private sector, and that in the absence of government redistribution the poor will still receive charity. They assert that higher taxes make it difficult for people to express their commitments voluntarily to each other through charitable contributions. See, e.g., Larry Catá Backer, Medieval Poor Law in Twentieth Century America: Looking Back Towards a General Theory of Modern American Poor Relief, 44 CASE W. RES. L. REV. 871, 929 – 34 (1995); Alice Gresham Bullock, Taxes, Social Policy and Philanthropy: The Untapped Potential of Middle- and Low-Income Generosity, 6 CORNELL J.L. & PUB. POL’Y 325, 327– 31 (1997).
8. See Donald L. McCabe and Linda Klebe Trevino, Academic Dishonesty: Honor Codes and Other Contextual Influences 64 J. HIGHER EDUC. 522 (1993).
