unwritten law

There’s an unwritten law that literary fiction set in the high plains be sturdy and simple — sentences firm as fence posts, commas hammered in as clean as barn nails.

But the facts of that night were swallowed up by a code of silence, the unwritten law that presumed police officers would shield one another from accountability.

For years, surfers, surf magazines and surf photographers mostly lived by that unwritten law in order to keep surfing’s secret spots secret.

The unwritten laws of baseball and common sense, which rarely coincide with each other on many situations, said it would happen eventually.

Even if there had been a good deli, unwritten laws said New York’s was best.