If the determination that a result is bad or in some way suboptimal is based on the full range of considerations of policy and principle that the court or anyone else would use without the rule, then what work is the rule itself doing? If our ability to perceive that a rule has generated the wrong result necessarily requires a sense of what the right result would be, and if that determination cannot be made by referring to the very rule whose soundness is now in question, then the common-law judge is deciding what the right result would be under a different rule or under no rule. And if every case in which the existing rule generates a result other than the one that appears correct in a rule-free evaluation is one that occasions a change in the rule, then why do we not just dispense with the rules entirely?

Unknown, Frederick Schauer - Thinkin…, loc. 222