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I recently became intrigued by the voice of integrity in wrestling between the spirit of a law and the letter of the law.  Or the spirit of a rule and the letter of it.  Or the spirit of one's word or the letter of it.

A friend who is a school principal finds that the law requires that only teachers of certain credentials can teach reading.  Those people are expensive, and she has budget constraints, and she wants and needs to get all her students to read.  So, she hires other people to teach reading, calls them and the class something different, and gets the job done.  What she is doing is technically a breach of the rules.  But it seems to be necessary if she is to get her job done.  And she appears to excel at getting her job done.

A colleague of mine, Judi McLean Parks, has taken to calling this phenomenon “organizational expediency,” which means bending the rules.

I was outraged to hear that absentee votes were being discarded because of typos and because, for example, they would write in a candidate but not check the box next to their write-in.  I am sure the people who do such things feel justified, but i think of the act as a deep breach of the intent of the process — which is to give people a voice.

The problem, of course, is that people often disagree about the spirit of the rule, law, or word.

Where does integrity come down regarding this issue?  What do you think?

Yet legal contracts are, I think, all about the letter.  Many managers seem to be guided by the letter of the law in deciding, for example, that subprime or interest-only mortgages were a good thing to sell to people who were unrealistically optimistic in their assessment of the future real-estate market.  Most savvy money managers rejected such mortgages for themselves, yet were willing to pawn them off on others.  Was there some “spirit of the law” violation that occurred there — quite apart from the legality of the mortgages?

personally, i suspect that in many cases the letter was followed, just not the spirit.  Everyone knows that a lender should not be writing loans that are unrealistic — e.g. huge house loans to someone with limited income.  But some lenders found legal and procedural  loopholes that allowed them to make those loans and then cash in.  Isn't that what a “good” lawyer often does — is finds ways that you can violate the spirit of a law while staying within the letter?