The Exception That Became the Rule

The exception was written for a single case, in a year when that case was unusual enough that nobody thought it worth a rule of its own. It said that where the ordinary procedure would produce an obviously wrong result, the head of the section might decide otherwise and record why.

For the first four years it was used twice, both times by Ahlgren, both times with a paragraph of reasons attached, and both times for a case that anybody reading the file afterwards would have recognised as the kind of case the exception had been written for.

What happened after that is not a scandal and is more interesting than one: the paragraph of reasons became a sentence, the sentence became a reference to the previous case, and by the eighth year the exception was being used, without reasons, for a class of cases that had never been unusual at all.

Wiesinger, who inherited the section, found forty-one uses in the last three years and no written reason later than the ninth, and she made the point that mattered rather than the one that was easy: not that the decisions had been wrong — most of them were plainly right — but that nobody could now say what the ordinary procedure was.

The rewritten section keeps the exception and requires the reasons in the same file rather than in a note somewhere. It adds one line that has done more than the rest of it together: every use is counted, and the count is read out once a year in the same meeting that reviews the procedure itself.

Nobody is asked to justify the number, and that is deliberate. A number that has to be defended becomes a number that people keep low, and the exception exists precisely for the cases in which the ordinary procedure fails; what the count does is make its use visible to the same people who could change the procedure, once a year, without anybody having to complain first.