Tensions in Practice: Specified responses and governed discretion¶
An invented shared workshop agreement
A workshop agreement can spell out responses to many foreseeable interruptions, or specify fewer cases and deliberately assign the remaining ones to a named coordinator. The latter avoids pretending to anticipate everything. It also gives the coordinator discretion, which the agreement must bound. Both versions still need a governed response to circumstances they did not enumerate.
Make responses predictable
Resolve likely, verifiable cases before a dispute arises.
Keep drafting proportionate
Leave costly or unforeseen details to an expressly authorized, constrained handler.
Why these aims pull against each other
Changing the specification boundary moves cases between a written-response path and a discretionary path. It does not make unforeseen cases disappear.
Choose an arrangement to see what changes and what remains difficult.
Arrows show the stated work, authority, or access paths. Position, length, and color do not measure time, risk, cost, or performance.
What this choice protects
What it costs
When it fits
Compare the arrangements
Specify more cases
Write responses for two selected foreseeable cases, while keeping an explicit residual regime for other cases.
- What it protects
- More routine responses are known without a fresh discretionary decision.
- What it costs
- Drafting and maintaining the extra rule takes work, including for a case that may never occur.
- When it fits
- Fits for likely, cheaply verifiable cases where predictability is worth the drafting cost.
Illustration note: This is an invented bounded arrangement. Arrows state the selected rights, flows or dependencies; they do not predict behavior or quantify outcomes.
Delegate more cases
Keep a written response for A, and expressly leave B plus other cases to the coordinator under the same charter.
- What it protects
- Less detail must be negotiated in advance; B can be handled in its actual context.
- What it costs
- B now depends on judgment rather than a promised response, increasing discretionary exposure and possible dispute.
- When it fits
- Fits when advance specification is costly and the coordinator’s authority and constraints are credible.
Illustration note: This is an invented bounded arrangement. Arrows state the selected rights, flows or dependencies; they do not predict behavior or quantify outcomes.
What this illustration does—and does not—establish
The canonical tension supplies the mechanism. The named setting, arrangements, conditions and costs are editorial constructions, not observed outcomes or universal prescriptions.
- Both coordinators are constrained by the same stipulated charter: workshop scope, recorded reasons, and a named route for contesting scope overreach. The graph labels summarize this regime; it is not unbounded discretion.
- A and B are placeholders for foreseeable verifiable interruptions, not a claim that every real contingency can be enumerated.
- The illustration is not a legal drafting recommendation and does not establish that the governance mechanisms will actually bind.
Source entries
Incomplete Contract
Incomplete Contract: Specification versus Delegation supplies this local tension. The concrete setting and selected alternatives are explicitly editorial applications.
Specification versus Delegation
T1 — Specification versus Delegation. The prime trades exhaustive enumeration for principled delegation to a handler, but the boundary between what to write down and what to leave open is itself a hard choice. The tension is scopal: specify too much and you pay drafting and verification cost on contingencies that never arise; specify too little and you hand the handler more discretion than you can govern. The failure mode is the naive completeness premise — believing a thorough enough specification can close every gap — which loses the impossible race against bounded foresight. Diagnostic: ask whether a contingency is cheaply verifiable and likely; specify those, delegate the rest deliberately rather than by omission.