Anti-Climacus

LINK: There's a paper idea, somewhere in my mind, waiting to be written on custom and tradition. In custom, lawyers tend to say that long use doesn't tell one very much about the normative status of a law, since there are many practices that endure even though they aren't desirable. Norm catches an example of relying on long use as a justification:

Rules that subsist for a long time because they're good ones are good because they're good, not because they're old; and rules sometimes subsist for a long time for other reasons than being good ones...