f you go look at real bureaucracies, it is not really the case that “at each level, the bosses tell the subordinates what to do and they just have to do it”. At every bureaucracy I’ve worked in/around, lower-level decision-makers had many de facto degrees of freedom. You can think of this as a generalization of one of the central problems of jurisprudence: in practice, human “bosses” (or legislatures, in the jurisprudence case) are not able to give instructions that unambiguously specify whatto do in all the crazy situations which come up in practice. Nor do people at the top have anywhere near the bandwidth needed to decide every ambiguous case themselves; there is far too much ambiguity in the world. So, in practice, lower-level people (i.e. judges at various levels) necessarily make many many judgment calls in the course of their work.
f you go look at real bureaucracies, it is not really the case that “at each level, the bosses tell the subordinates what to do and they just have to do it”. At every bureaucracy I’ve worked in/around, lower-level decision-makers had many de facto degrees of freedom. You can think of this as a generalization of one of the central problems of jurisprudence: in practice, human “bosses” (or legislatures, in the jurisprudence case) are not able to give instructions that unambiguously specify whatto do in all the crazy situations which come up in practice. Nor do people at the top have anywhere near the bandwidth needed to decide every ambiguous case themselves; there is far too much ambiguity in the world. So, in practice, lower-level people (i.e. judges at various levels) necessarily make many many judgment calls in the course of their work.