Rules versus Standards

Kaplow, L. (1992). Rules versus Standards: An Economic Analysis. Duke Law Journal, 42(3), 557-629.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1992

Volume

42

Issue

3

Pages

557-629

DOI

10.2307/1372840

DOI registrant

JSTOR

Link

https://doi.org/10.2307/1372840

Cited from

computer_science

Cited by

5 citations across 5 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Decidability Computability
  • Standards and compliance. Whether a product complies with a standard is a decidability property of how the standard is drafted, not of the product: vague standards make compliance undecidable in practice and shift power to whoever interprets them.

    This sourceAnalyzes when legal commands are framed as rules versus standards, and how the choice governs whether compliance is mechanically determinable up front or requires costly after-the-fact interpretation — the decidability-of-compliance trade.

    Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract

    Kaplow's abstract backs only the rules-versus-standards frame — content fixed ex ante versus given ex post — not the claim's product-level 'undecidability' or its power-shift clause.

    “Second, when individuals can determine the application of rules to their contemplated acts more cheaply, conduct is more likely to reflect the content of previously promulgated rules than of standards that will be given content only after individuals act.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Domain-specific

• Fallacy of Accident
  • The jurisprudential rule/standard distinction is a different contrast, between law whose content is fixed before people act (a rule) and law given content only when it is applied (a standard)

    This sourceTreats the choice between rules and standards as a question of whether the law is given content before individuals act (rules) or afterwards, at application (standards), with rules costlier to promulgate and standards costlier to interpret and apply.

Mechanisms

• Discretion Matrix
  • It is the practical embodiment of the rules-versus-standards trade-off

    This sourceAnalyzes the rules-versus-standards choice in terms of ex-ante and ex-post specification and application costs.

• Policy Discretion Bounds
  • The design tension it manages is the rules-versus-standards trade-off

    This sourceAnalyzes the rules-versus-standards trade-off, including how rigid ex-ante rules can be underinclusive relative to standards applied to particular cases.

• Published Selection Criteria
  • Over-specify, and the criteria become a checklist gamed to the letter while the intent is missed; under-specify, and discretion creeps back in under cover of vague language — the familiar rules-versus-standards trade-off, with no free position on it.

    This sourceAnalyzes a rules-versus-standards trade-off in which each form carries different creation, interpretation, and application costs.

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 1 of 5 citations: 1 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.

• https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/dlj/vol42/iss3/2/ ×4

Registry ID ref:166d1ffba3a3 · see in the full table