INTRODUCTION Imagine the following situation: As a student in a law school course, you are regularly assigned a daily reading load of 20 pages in preparation for the next day's class. Today, however, you received an extraordinary assignment of 200 pages, clearly more than you can feasibly prepare in one day. What should you do? What would be a principled mode of action, given that you cannot renegotiate or otherwise modify the command? Should you resort to the normal, "reasonable" practice of preparing 20 pages out of the assigned 200? Or should you, perhaps, disregard the unreasonable command of 200 altogether and in the absence of any other affirmative instruction read 0 pages? Or, perhaps yet, should you disregard only the unreasonable excess of the command and prepare the maximum level that is still tolerable, of say 50 pages?
