If you know me much, you know I kinda like to follow the rules. Of my siblings, I’m probably the second most conservative driver (after slowlane). And though I have once or twice asked family members to forge my signature for me, I have done so rather reluctantly, and done so much less than others. During Napster’s hey-day I conscientiously avoided participating, and even today I very rarely pull any restricted music off the internet, and I don’t use unlicensed software. I’ve never been able to say any “vulgarities” stronger than “crap”, “dang”, or “good grief”, and can’t write any words (except in quotations) stronger than “shit”. I never tried to drink as a minor, and have never tried any recreational drugs. So as you can see, I’m sickly faithful to following the rules, but the truth is, there are good reasons to break rules. There are many good reasons to break social norms, the enumeration of which I will leave as an exercise for the reader, or for another time. Here I would like to explore the reasons for breaking the law.

One situation is fairly mundane. Laws are made as generalizations, and despite the recent increase of legal code, laws are not meant to specifically cover every individual situation. The letter of the law says not to drive through an intersection when the light is red. But if you’re taking a dying person to the emergency room at 3:00 in the morning, not many people would expect you to wait out the stop light. We all apply similar reasoning to everyday situations, figuring for example that when the speed limit is 65 and the slowest vehicles are going 70, following the letter of the law doesn’t make sense. In Brazil, there are so many stop signs and stop lights that the society as whole has downgraded ‘pare’ (’stop’) in that context to mean ‘yield’. The letter of the law says that you aren’t supposed to drive faster than 65, or you aren’t supposed to coast through the intersection, but as long as you don’t go too fast, neither the traffic cops nor the other drivers will care. When the society as a whole has decided that the speed limit should effectively be 70 rather than 65 or that those signs should be yield signs rather than stop signs, it is advisable to make the legal code agree with that social norm, to get rid of ambiguity and confusion. This is the sort of ambiguity that makes it easier for law enforcement to discriminate, and the confusion that has many many people thinking that anything is fine as long as you don’t get caught. What matters is not getting caught or not, but the standard of behavior established by the society you participate in. On matters that get codified as law, the law should agree with those social standards.

Another situation is when there is an unjust law restricting your own behavior. In some such situations, these restrictions might be merely inconvenient, other times oppressive, and sometimes they might require complicity in someone else’s oppression. Clearly, laws that require complicity in the oppression of someone else must be violated. At the other extreme are inconveniences due to different understandings of the details of how a political system should work. These, I believe, should be tolerated. In a democracy, we will have differences of opinions about what behaviors are constructive and permissible, and which behaviors should be regulated or left to individual choice. In the public forum, voice your opposition to these laws, but for the sake of the rule of law, the legal code deserves some respect even when it diverges from your personal sense of justice. For example, I believe that pot should be regulated more like alcohol or tobacco than cocaine. (And alcohol should be less regulated as well.) But as long as pot is illegal, I don’t want to try it. On the other hand, I believe the current system of penalties for possession is oppressive, and thus (among other reasons) wouldn’t be able to work in law enforcement. When you find yourself in a situation where you must violate a law because of it’s oppressive nature, expect the possibility of the corresponding legal penalty. In some cases this might mean certain legal or financial preparations. Some cases would be subsumed in the following category.

A third situation is the case of passive resistance or civil disobedience, when there is an unjust law, legal system, or corporate policy, whose injustice needs to be revealed and highlighted for the public, to force a change. The goal of breaking the law in this case is to raise awareness of the issue, and use the contrast between the official crime and the legalized injustice to turn public opinion against the unjust policy. Ideally, you would want to only break the single unjust law, so that the ‘crime’ committed is directly linked to its injustice. In real life, however, this is rarely possible. When the injustice lies in how public funds are spent or how multinational corporations escape responsibilities by taking advantage of lenient regulations abroad, there is no unjust law that an individual can target for violation. In this kind of situation, where breaking the law is public relations, there are three often competing constraints. First, in order for there to be a strong association in the minds of the audience between the crime and the injustice, the violated law should be closely related, conceptually or contextually. Second, in order to be persuasive, the crime should be minimal–if you are violating the unjust law, violate that law alone, if at all possible, and if you are violating some other law, do something that is just barely illegal, to delineate the boundary between what we as a society have decided is and is not legally permissible. When protest actions stray towards more serious crimes, it becomes very easy for people to assign a label of miscreant or criminal, and dismiss the message of the action. Third, in order to strongly influence a wide audience, the action has to be highly visible and arrest people’s attention. I have the urge to try to elaborate how this balancing act should work, but since I have no experience in any such things, I would probably not illuminate much.

This seems to me to be a fairly complete list of reasons for law-breaking, but if you think I’ve left something out, I’d like to hear about it.

Last semester in the class I was teaching I did an experiment that I thought had clearly interpretable, interesting results. Well aware that my students were quite unaccustomed to linguistic analysis, I didn’t expect any of them to see all that was obvious to me, but the write-ups I received were still disappointing. Many of the students did no linguistic analysis, and those that did rarely noted even the patterns that I thought were really basic. So here, as catharsis, I will present the experiment and what I conclude from it.

The question we start with is this. Officially, saying something like “Me and my brother were chatting” is ‘bad grammar’. However, people say stuff like that all the time. Also, related phrasings that are officially more grammatical, like “I and my brother were chatting” are rarely used. Why is ‘bad grammar’ (like “Me and my brother were chatting”) so common while other related options are rare? The answer to this question reveals that ‘bad grammar’ and ‘proper English’ aren’t quite what people normally conceive them to be.

I presented my students with the following example sentences and asked them to rate their acceptability on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is something that doesn’t really sound like English, 3 is something you don’t think you would say but you hear other people say, and 5 is something you would feel fine saying. (The implication here is that sentences rated 2 and 4 lie somewhere between the sentences rated 1 & 3 and 3 & 5, respectively, but there were a couple students who missed that, thinking the only options were 1, 3, and 5. Do we speak the same language?) We then averaged everyone’s ratings. My deapest apologies to those of my readers who care about statistical significance, since I did not collect the data on a case-by-case basis, precluding variance calculations.

There are several patterns worth noting here. The first sentence (a) was included just to verify that people understood the task, so let’s start with the second block.

In sentences (b) through (e), note that there is a very strong preference for ‘I’ rather than ‘me’ as the subject of the sentence, and a similarly strong preference for ‘me’ rather than ‘I’ to come as the object of the preposition ‘with’. It’s because of this that ‘I’ is often called a subject pronoun, and ‘me’ is called an object pronoun. This contrast between ‘I’ and ‘me’ is very widespread, and similar contrasts are common in other languages and used to be much more common in English. But now, this sort of contrast only appears with personal pronouns. Glancing ahead quickly, also note that none of the other sentences recieve scores as high or as low as sentences (a) through (e). The more complex sentences are neither as acceptable as the good sentences here, nor as unacceptable as the bad sentences here.

In sentences (f) through (i), we note that between (f) and (h) there is a strong preference for ‘I’ to come after ‘my brother’, whereas between (g) and (i) there is a noticeable preference for ‘me’ to come before ‘my brother’. The other thing to notice is that, in contrast to the pattern we noted in (b) through (e), ‘me’ seems quite acceptable in the subject. In fact, if we average the score from (f) with (h) and the one from (g) with (i), we get 3.05 for both! The choice between ‘I’ or ‘me’ has no net effect on the acceptability of this sentence. If we average the other way, we see that there is an overall preference (3.65 vs 2.45) for ‘my brother’ to come before the first person pronoun. To explain this preference, you may recall from grade school an admonission to “put others before yourself” in situations like this as a sign of respect. But why is “I and my brother” still less acceptable than “My brother and me” or “Me and my brother”, contrary to the strong preference for ‘I’ that we observed in (b) through (e)? We leave this question unanswered for the moment.

In sentences (j) through (m), we note that (j), (k) and (l) are all approximately of the same acceptability, whereas (m) is much less. Based on the patterns we have noted above, it is quite understandable that (m) is rated so poorly since it violates two generalizations: we have the subject pronoun ‘I’ in the object of a preposition, and we have it preceding ‘my brother’. Note however, that sentences (k) and (l) each violate one generalization, while (j) violates neither, and yet (j) is the worst rated of the three. What is going on here?

To answer these questions, we will take a look at some usage data in part 2.