If Internal Audit recommended, in a 63-page memo, that the highest-ranking person at the dinner table put everything on his corporate tab; that funny red drinks with umbrellas not be approved as a business expense; that only 46.5 percent of the cost of business meals would be reimbursed; if the client didn’t buy something as a result of being liquored up, the meal expense would be denied; and that lunches that lasted after 3 p.m. would be considered vacation time, with no reimbursement allowed; how should the corporation respond?

Mumble something about how important it is to curb corporate expenses. Appoint a task force. Whisper to the task force that there is something to be said for gridlock, leading to lack of action. Go have lunch. A long lunch. With a funny red drink.

Gridlock and uncertainty and ambiguity aren’t really so bad, when you’re trying to address a problem that may or may not be much of a problem; when your solution seems likely to prompt even more ambiguity and confusion and uncertainty.

Politicians in particular are criticized for running away from tough decisions, from stalling in the face of complexity – but, again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If the issue under consideration is enough of a mess, delay and uncertainty might be the correct approach. You can do the right thing (pause for the sake of clarity) for the wrong reasons (you are a political coward).

Consider all the huffing and puffing at the Legislature on the issue of anti-bullying legislation, vaguely intended to discourage bullying at schools, to protect students from bullying, to require school to report on and respond to bullying; and to teach the kids that it’s not appropriate to bully until you get to be a newspaper editor or bank president or something similarly awful.

Laying Down The Law

Some towns already have such stuff on the books; most states have enacted some form of anti-bullying legislation. The Massachusetts legislators have had their emotional, invigorating public hearings on the subject. It would seem like a no-brainer; at the worst, a feel-good kind of thing that allows each legislator to go home and bask in the glory of having a kind heart.

But anti-bullying legislation in Massachusetts has gone nowhere in years past—quietly or noisily buried and run away from, at the behest of school administrators and lawyers and legislators who know the issue is much more messy and ambiguous and complex that is apparent on the surface. This might well be a case in which delay and avoidance is the right path.

If school bullying becomes a matter of law, as opposed to the arbitrary and capricious judgment of a cranky assistant principal, the definitional frailties of “bullying” becomes a legal and regulatory nightmare.

If a population of clueless youngsters engages in bullying, whatever that is, are they engaged in “innocent” cruelty or “knowing” criminality? When exactly does “free speech” become “bullying” – especially in an environment of children?

In a 1949 U.S. Supreme Court case involving a regulation against “loud and raucous” noise, the justices noted the importance of legal clarity, which “conveys to any interested person a sufficiently accurate concept of what is forbidden.”

That, at least in theory, is what bothers many educators and legislators about anti-bullying legislation. To be sure, there are examples of cruel and singularly awful bullying that clueless school officials fail to deal with. But, in many, if not most, cases, the distinction between ‘bullying” and innocent teasing is murky at best.

As a practical matter, in jurisdictions that have anti-bullying law on the books, the punishments are a weird and arbitrary mess, because it is so difficult to draw the definition narrowly enough to punish a rather unspecific conduct.

The best approach for a reluctant state such as Massachusetts is to pass a vague and low-key bill that would be sufficiently clear on intent, but not on process. The Connecticut version, for example, passed in 2008, requires, among other things, that there is “adequate adult supervision” in “specific areas” where bullying is most likely to occur – the lunchroom and hallways, for example. There. Mission sort of accomplished.