Lobsters, Cornish pasties and rigid rules
SIR – I understand what Ann Farmer is saying (Letter, October 19) but she overstates her case. The difficulty of rigid rules that try to cover every case has long been understood. Indeed, in an English secular context it was the medieval Catholic Church, through clerical judges (pre-Reformation judges were generally clerics because of the requirement for judicial literacy), which developed the concept of “equity” to cover those cases where to apply the strict letter of the law would result in injustice. Justice, after all, is the objective which rules and the law itself are supposed to aim for. The crucial difference is that equity is discretionary.
