Mit Augenmaß — with eye-measure. The German phrase for judgment exercised in proportion, and it is praise.
Fingerspitzengefühl — fingertip feeling. Sensitivity in handling a situation, and it is what experience is supposed to produce.
Nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen — to the best of knowledge and conscience. A formula used in German declarations and reports where certainty is not available.
German administrative and legal language returns to it constantly — im Einzelfall, in the individual case, Einzelfallprüfung, individual examination. The general rule is stated and the particular case is then examined against it.
A constitutional principle in German law with a defined three-part test: suitability, necessity, and appropriateness in the narrow sense. Judgment is required, and the structure within which it must be exercised is itself specified.
A German Meister is trained and examined in the trade and then exercises judgment within it — which materials, which method, when to stop. The qualification is the licence to depart from the obvious procedure.
German job advertisements specify years of Berufserfahrung in the relevant field, and it is what the culture treats as the source of judgment. Discretion is granted to people who have been formed, not to people who are clever.
German quality systems permit departure from a documented procedure where it is justified, assessed and recorded. Deviating is allowed. Deviating silently is not.
German rules are commonly drafted as a presumption: in der Regel, as a rule, this applies — with departure permitted where the case justifies it, and the justification recorded. The exception is anticipated in the drafting.
German statutes frequently use deliberately broad terms — good faith, reasonableness, good morals — which courts fill case by case. The law is written to require judgment rather than to eliminate it.
Ermessensspielraum. German administrative law grants officials a defined room for judgment within a rule, and a decision can be challenged for failing to exercise it as well as for exceeding it. The discretion is part of the rule, with its own boundaries.
Duden, the German dictionary, defines abweichen as: to change direction; to be different, to differentiate.
Synonyms are: differ, deviate, vary, veer, depart, stray, drift, digress, swerve, aberrate. But also to be at variance, to go rogue.