There’s an interesting doctrine at law. It’s called the Doctrine of Judicial Restraint.
What it means is that when a court has the opportunity to decide a case on either a broader principle or a more narrow principle, the Doctrine of Judicial Restraint always suggests that the more appropriate resolution is on the narrower ruling, not the broader one.
It makes a lot of sense, if you think about it.
If you decide something on the narrower ruling based upon the facts in that particular situation, you are more confident that ruling is applicable to those particular circumstances. However, the broader you provide your ruling as you generalize your language, the more situations you subsume under that particular ruling and, accordingly, the less confident you can be that there will be a set of circumstances to which it is not really truly applicable, relevant, or even true.
Therefore, decide on the narrower principle that you are very confident in and you can always broaden it in the future if circumstances arise that would produce the same result but would require a broader ruling.
On the other hand, if you choose the broader principle, what you may very well find is there is a set of circumstances to which it does not apply in which case you either have to recant, contradict yourself, or begin to waiver as to the applicability of that particular principle.
I was thinking about that the other day, not in the legal context but in the context of a life situation.
I had sent a burn and die letter to a contractor based upon some phenomenally poor work he had done in providing furnishings for the remodeling of our home. My original draft did not distinguish between the companies itself and the agent with whom we had dealt in the original order. On the other hand, I truly had the impression that the person I had dealt with was really a genuine person.
On the one side, I could have chosen to just simply lump the company and the agent together. On the other hand, my gut instinct was suggesting to me that was not appropriate.
Therefore, I took the same burn and die draft and modified it, presenting the argument for what had transpired directly to the agent and soliciting the agent’s help in trying to rectify the situation. I put the agent on the side of being my ally and distinguished the agent from the way the company had dealt with us.
I must admit that I laced as much guilt as I possibly could imagine into the letter and created the tone of absolute incredulity as to how this particular situation had unfolded and how shocked I am sure the agent would be once she knew what had happened.
I faxed the letter at approximately 4 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. By Saturday night, I had received three phone calls from individuals in the company, including the agent to whom I had sent the letter. It took me literally a half hour to get her off the phone as she indicated to me how much she was on my side and how she was going to make things right. More importantly, she told me how much she had appreciated the trust I had placed in her. She took the letter and put it under the nose of her boss, indicating to her how strong had been the relationship she had created with me that I would have the trust to send that letter directly to her rather than to the company itself.
Janet and I were talking about the situation later and realized that, when it came right down to it, it turned out to be far better for us not to suggest or even imply that she was a conspirator in the bad deeds, and that, in fact, all the time, she was really on our side.
I truly have no idea whether she had a blind eye to what had been transpiring over the four months of our poor service. What I do know, however, is by taking the narrower approach to the situation, I not only salvaged the situation, but I produced the result I was looking for: performance and completion of the project in less than a week after the letter was received.
When you have a choice between the broader application and the narrower application, choose the narrower application because, in the first instance, you can be more confident that it’s accurate; and secondly, it allows you the opportunity to expand the application only if the facts prove it to be the case.
Original writing date: November 2003