de facto and de jure

One of the things that makes the study of law so interesting is that you spend years learning all these cool Latin phrases and then you spend the first ten years of your law practice remembering how to speak in plain English. Some people never figure that out. But two phrases that sort of came to the forefront for me this weekend were de facto and de jure. De facto is defined as a past action or state of affairs that is not actually legal or legitimate, but which must be accepted for all practical purposes because that's just the way it is. De jure means a condition that is in total compliance with all requirements of law. For people who do not study law or Latin, you most often heard these phrases during the discussions of school segregation, where the courts made a distinction between de jure segregation, which was an actual law saying that the school had to be segregated, and de facto segregation, where there was no law, but just based on where people lived and the drawing of the school districts, the schools just sort of ended up mostly segregated. The application of this principle that hit me this weekend was a really, really tough question - When you find a situation that is not in accordance with the rules/laws, but which nevertheless has been going on for a long time, (therefore the de facto situation), when do you change what you are doing to match the law and when do you change the law to match the situation? What do you do when you can't change the law but people will hate you for changing the situation? As I was home this weekend, I started working on a couple of projects. One of them was my list of committees and appointments. To help me organize my thoughts on appointments and people who have volunteered and what I want from each committee, I made a list of all the positions for which I have to appoint people. This includes finding my guy, my most immediate task for next January and February, then finding some co-chairs for some committees, which have to be appointed a year from now, then finding my ten appointive Grand Officers, then finding my Deputies, which I estimate will be forty, then finding Grand Representatives (35), members for standing committees (100+), special committes (40+) and Grand Chapter Week committees (110+). I made the general list a long time ago, just to get a feel for the job, but this weekend, I got more specific and added to my list the length of term for each job, so when I ask people, I can tell them how long until they are "paroled" out of the job, and how many people that other people appointed will still be on the committee and so will need my expectations letters even though I am not the one asking them to serve, and how many people need to be asked early and how many people I need to get from people behind me for them to appoint early. Well, in making my list and checking it twice, I had to do a fair bit of reading in my Constitution and there I discovered that a lot of the people that we are appointing are really special committees and not actually required ones, and that some of the required ones are not being done in the way the book says. Now in some of these instances, what is being done is working fine but it is not what is written down, and in some instances, what is written down would work better but is not being done. So which way do you lean? Do you make the de facto the de jure by trying to change the rules or do you change the de facto to match the de jure? Of course, if people like me didn't read the darn books, we wouldn't have these problems, right? If we would just stick to what "everyone" knows, these problems wouldn't come up in the first place, right? In some instances, we've been doing the de facto for so long, no one can remember it any other way and if you told them that it is illegal, they would simply refuse to believe you. After all, everyone knows the world is flat, right? And the earth is the center of the universe, right? And if we don't dance in the evergreen groves on the winter solstice, the sun will never come back and we will all die, right? And illnesses are caused by evils spirits so if you need to let the bad spirits out, you drill holes in the person's head, right? And look what happened to the guys who challenged these notions - nothing good, that's for sure! So what is a person to do? It is especially a sticky wicket when you don't even have the choice on which way to conform. If you have the choice, then you can put out a proposed rules change and if people vote to change the rules to match the de facto, then you are home free and if they vote no on the change, then you know that you need to change the de facto to match the current law (the de jure). But when you have no right to change the law, you are stuck enforcing it even if people hate it and all you can do to help yourself is to try to explain the problem. We had this arise some years ago over what I call the bingo/bunco problem. In a rule that we have no power to change, Chapters can have bingo games as long as it is not gambling and we follow very strict rules to make sure it is not gambling. We cannot sell extra cards for example, and prizes have to be donated and a bunch of other rules. But Chapters are not allowed to have Bunco nights. We didn't make this rule up and we do not have the power to change it, but people didn't like hearing this and made quite the fuss. Well, my other project of the weekend, which involved starting to slot up my calendar so I can give some dates to people who want to start planning Chapter Anniversaries that fall during what I hope will be my year, led me to go over some stuff that I believe means that some really big "always done" items are very de facto and very not de jure. And to make things worse, these things are things that we cannot change, so I either have to tell people to change what they do or stick my head in the sand and pretend not to see what is going on around me constantly, a skill that I am not very good at, I confess. I tend to be a little more on the side of the rules, I fear. At least I have a year or more to think about it and by then I will have a man who can tell me how he feels about the placement of his head too, in the sand or in the noose. At least burning at the stake for heresy is no longer on the list of potential punishments. :-) Next weekend I am in San Francisco for the Grand Lodge's annual event.