The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly. — Abraham Lincoln

The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.

Author: Abraham Lincoln

Insight: When a rule is genuinely unjust, following it to the letter can actually be more powerful than breaking it outright. If you enforce every detail without mercy or common sense, the absurdity becomes impossible to ignore. Suddenly everyone—not just critics—experiences the real cost of the law, and that shared frustration builds pressure for change faster than arguments alone ever could. This plays out surprisingly often in everyday life. A manager implementing a new policy exactly as written, without exceptions, quickly reveals whether it actually works. A parent enforcing every rule in the handbook without flexibility shows their teenager why some rules need rethinking. The strict enforcement becomes a kind of mirror: it forces people to confront what they actually created, rather than letting them hide behind good intentions. The counterintuitive part is that this works because it removes the escape hatch of selective application. When people can pick and choose which rules to follow, broken laws stay quietly broken, and nobody has to seriously reckon with them. But turn the machine on full blast? Now the burden becomes real, visible, and shared. That's when reform becomes not an idealistic wish but a practical necessity.

Source: Letter to William H. Herndon (December 1848)