The importance of what a rule actually says is not just a point about rules. More pervasively, to ignore the even more ubiquitous importance of what rules do even when what they do appears unfair is to ignore something very important about law itself. It is not law's purpose, of course, to be unfair for the sake of being unfair. But there is an important group of values-predictability of result, uniformity of treatment (treating like cases alike), and fear of granting unfettered discretion to individual decision-makers even if they happen to be wearing black robes-that the legal system, especially, thinks it valuable to preserve. These values often go by the name of the Rule of Law, and many of the virtues of the Rule of Law are ones that are accomplished by taking rules seriously as rules. In doing so, law remains irreducibly formal and thus at times seemingly unfair in particular cases. But law is more than simply doing the right thing in each individual case. At times law's unwillingness to do just that will seem wrong, but what makes law what it is-usually for better but sometimes for worse-is that it takes larger institutional and systemic values as important, even if occasionally at the expense of justice or wise policy or efficiency in the individual case.

Unknown, Frederick Schauer - Thinkin…, loc. 61