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When the rule bends: In a system that prizes certainty, reform is careful, not accidental, writes Rebecca Ward, MBA.
Ask someone why a rule feels immovable, and you’ll hear it: That’s the law.
It sounds like granite, final, unyielding, above debate. Yet every law carries a version number. Statutes are amended. Precedents are narrowed or overturned. What looks permanent is often just the current settlement between evidence, ethics, politics, and community values.
We prefer fixed answers. Brains love binaries. Lawyers are trained in binaries. But durable change doesn’t arrive as thunder. It’s built slowly, through cases, committees, campaigns, and, sometimes, contrition.
Consider three quick moments:
Decriminalisation of same-sex activity in Australia didn’t happen overnight. South Australia led in 1975; Tasmania followed in 1997; marriage equality arrived nationally in 2017.
Slavery ended formally in the British Empire with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (UK), yet Australia wrestled with coercive labour well into the 20th century.
And that Bible in the witness box? Under the Oaths Act 1900 (NSW) and similar laws, any witness may swear an oath or make a secular affirmation. The law protects truth-telling by belief or by principle.
The headline is neat; the history is layered.
So yes: It depends. On institutions. On evidence. On what a community is willing to name, and rename.
Why certainty feels safe, and why reform looks dangerous
Legal systems trade in reliability. Clients plan on it, courts insist on it, markets require it. Stare decisis, precedent, is the muscle memory that keeps like cases alike. But stare decisis is a discipline, not a shackle.
When societies evolve, it’s rarely because logic changes; it’s because moral emphasis does. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes that people reason from instinctive moral foundations, care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty, and only later justify those instincts with logic.
That friction explains why reforms like the abolition of slavery or marriage equality felt radical before they became self-evident.
Reform looks risky because it disturbs settled expectations. The antidote to chaos isn’t stasis; it’s process, hearings, reviews, dissent, appeal, the mechanisms that let moral evolution occur without implosion.
Who gets to change the law?
Three engines do the heavy lifting:
No single engine works alone for long. Durable reform usually needs at least two courts plus Parliament, or Parliament plus people, to lock in the gain.
When argument and emotion share a crucible
Law likes to think of itself as pure logic. It isn’t. Good reform needs both facts and feelings, not theatre, but moral imagination.
Haidt’s work helps explain why. Reformers often appeal to care and fairness; opponents speak from loyalty, authority, or sanctity. Each side believes it is defending virtue. Progress comes when language bridges those moral foundations, when fairness is shown to honour loyalty, when care is framed as preservation, not rebellion.
The AIDS crisis reframed privacy and public health. Survivor testimony reshaped our understanding of coercive control and consent. Economic evidence has refined sentencing and bail. Emotion points to harm; argument designs the remedy. The crucible works when stories are tested against data and pain becomes principle.
Faith, culture, and the WEIRD imprint
We should tread carefully here. In WEIRD societies (Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic), religious traditions have profoundly shaped moral vocabularies, including legal ones. Universities were founded by churches. Parliaments are still open with prayers. Even our language of justice borrows from scripture.
And then there’s the oath. “So help me God.” But which God? My God? Your God? Yahweh? Zeus? Ra? The Force? What God? The phrase rolls off the tongue as though belief were singular, settled, and universal. It isn’t. It’s cultural residue, a reminder that for centuries, truth was guaranteed by fear of divine consequence.
To its credit, modern law recognises pluralism. Under Australian evidence and oaths legislation, any witness may swear an oath or make a secular affirmation. Both bind equally. The duty is to truth itself, not the deity invoked.
Freedom of religion and freedom from religious compulsion coexist uneasily but effectively. The phrase remains, fossilised in ceremony, proof that even in secular courts, history hums beneath the transcript.
The courage to revisit the rule
“It’s the law” is a statement of the present, not a prophecy of the future. The law is not a monument; it is a conversation, one conducted across generations about what justice requires in the light of what humanity learns. In a common-law democracy, rules are promises we renegotiate with evidence. Precedent gives ballast; Parliament gives reach; the people give conscience. Faith and culture supply the moral vocabularies; institutions translate them into rights and duties that bind us equally.
So, when someone insists a rule cannot move, resist the theatre of permanence. Ask instead: has the world moved, and has the law kept pace? Check the venue. Trace the evidence. Price the trade-offs. For the strength of a legal system lies not in the volume of its certainties but in the integrity of its reconsideration, in its willingness to change its mind, carefully, openly, and for good reason.
Rebecca Ward is an MBA-qualified management consultant with a focus on mental health. She is the managing director of Barristers’ Health, which supports the legal profession through management consulting and psychotherapy. Barristers’ Health was founded in memory of her brother, Steven Ward, LLB.
