The landscape of rules governing access to personal information for health research: a view from afar.

What is asked, or should be asked, of the law student is not that he learn, by heart, and in all their detail, all the rules in force during his time as student: that will be of little service to him in his later professional life when many of those rules will have changed. Of far greater importance to the student will be a knowledge of the structure within which the rules and concepts are organized, the meaning of these categories and concepts, and the relationship of the rules among themselves. The legislators may, indeed, with a stroke of the pen modify the actual legal rules, but these other elements and features nonetheless subsist. They cannot be so arbitrarily changed because they are intimately linked to our civilization and ways of thinking. The legislators can have no more effect on them than upon our language or our reasoning process.