Letter or spirit of the rule

Bentham wants a fully codified law, clear and systematic, in which every offence and every penalty is defined in advance, so as to take justice out of the judge's discretion and out of the nonsense of the common law. This trust in explicit, pre-established rules rather than in case-by-case prudential judgement places him on the side of legalism, even though the rule itself remains justified by utility.

Of Laws in General and Constitutional Code (the codification project) · A Fragment on Government (against the arbitrariness of the common law)

Mill denies that utility must be recomputed at each act: humanity has accumulated, through experience, secondary rules (do not lie, do not kill) that condense the lessons of what serves happiness. These rules guide ordinary conduct, yet remain subordinate to the principle of utility and may yield in cases of conflict: a tempered legalism, open to equity.

Utilitarianism, ch. 2 (the corollaries of the principle and conflicts of rules)

No rule can anticipate the singularity of each situation: Wheelwright Bian cannot pass on his knack through precepts, and Cook Ding follows no method but the very contours of the real. Right action is a living, formulaless adjustment, lost the moment one fixes it into a code. Zhuangzi thus stands resolutely on the side of the spirit against the letter, and more than that: he refuses the very idea that rightness could ever be put into letter.

Zhuangzi, ch. 13 (Wheelwright Bian) · Zhuangzi, ch. 3 (Cook Ding)

If duty and propriety must be codified, it is because lived virtue has already vanished: for Laozi, the very appearance of rules is the symptom of a fall, not its cure. Taoism thus turns Confucianism's own program against it: the rites, study and ostentatious morality that Confucianism raises into the path of social repair in fact betray the loss of the dao 道 (the Way), and the effort to enforce them hardens hearts instead of attuning them. For the rigid application of a code the sage substitutes a spontaneity attuned to the case at hand, with no fixed model: conduct governed not by the letter but by the ziran 自然 (spontaneity of the natural) of each situation.

Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 18, 38 · Zhuangzi, ch. 3 (The Secret of Caring for Life)

The proliferation of rules is for Laozi a symptom of decadence, not a remedy. Rightness cannot be codified; it comes from a supple, living accord with the situation, which places Laozi on the side of the spirit against the letter, out of distrust of every letter.

Dao De Jing, ch. 57 and 38

Taking up Aristotle's equity (epieikeia), Thomas holds that the law, by its generality, can fail in the singular case where its literal application would contradict the legislator's intention and the common good: one must then depart from it to follow what justice and the common good require. The rule is therefore not a letter to be applied mechanically but the expression of a reasonable intention that prudence interprets, which leans toward the spirit against legalism.

Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, q. 120 (epieikeia)

Aristotelianism makes a theme of epieikeia, the equity that corrects the law where its generality renders it unjust in a particular case. Since no rule can anticipate every case, justice requires the discernment of practical wisdom, tilting the position toward the spirit rather than the letter.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V, 10

No rule holds for all times: success depends on the match between one's manner of acting and the quality of the times, and whoever does not bend his conduct when they change is undone. Practical wisdom prevails over the fixed rule, but in the service of effectiveness, not of equity.

The Prince, ch. XXV

No abstract rule can enclose life: genius does not receive its law from without but gives it to itself, and the singular case, the exception, the impulse of the heart are worth more than the uniform letter. Against the moral legalism of the Enlightenment and the coldness of the universal maxim, Romanticism trusts the living spirit, the situation and sensuous intuition rather than the formal command.

Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man · F. Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments

The li 禮 (rites) are an indispensable form, but worthless without the spirit that animates them: a man without humaneness, what has he to do with the rites?. Ritual must be performed with the right feeling, and the master tailors his teaching to each disciple: the letter without the heart is empty. The leaning is thus toward equity and discernment, without abolishing the ritual form.

Analects, III, 3 (without humaneness, what use are the rites?) · Analects, XI, 22 (the master answers each disciple differently)