Rules are useful until circumstances reveal why judgment exists.

Rules encode good judgment so it can be applied quickly and by people who have not yet developed it, and that is genuinely valuable. Their limitation appears when a situation arrives that the rule was never designed for, and following it produces exactly the outcome the rule existed to prevent. Judgment is what handles those cases.

When a rule seems to give a wrong answer, ask what it was originally protecting. Then serve that purpose rather than the wording. Departing from a rule requires understanding it first.