Last week , while returning from a trip to upstate New York, my wife and I found ourselves on the highway just north of St. Louis in Southern Illinois. About 30 miles from St. Louis, we saw a sign that said that there was road construction two and one half miles ahead and that the road would shortly go from two lanes to one lane. What I found amazing was that it appeared that all of the cars on the road were, in fact, moving from two lanes down to one in an orderly fashion.

As a lawyer and law professor I am always interested in the phenomenon of “voluntary compliance” with legal and other rules, particularly when there are no potential sanctions for violating rules. Many years ago, when I was a young professor I wrote an article about voluntary compliance with tax laws and how this functioned — or I should say whether this functioned — in the U.S. As it happens, I am now working on an update to that piece with a colleague of mine.

So I was quite interested to see this apparent voluntary compliance with road rules. I thought that it was also interesting that there was an Illinois state police cruiser parked next to the sign announcing the lane closing. So it may be that the implicit threat that the police might ticket those who didn’t comply made drivers get into one lane as well.

But two and one half miles is a long way where highways are concerned. As soon as the police car was out of sight a number of drivers behind me began to pull out of the single lane that had formed and began to drive in the lane that would soon be shut in an attempt to jump ahead in the queue. Very quickly this formed a bottleneck and progress in the single lane came to a grinding halt. I suppose that this really didn’t surprise me. Indeed, it rather confirmed my belief that voluntary compliance without the threat of sanctions doesn’t work very well in this country.

What did surprise me after a few moments is what a number of trucks ahead of me in line began to do. I think that several of the truck drivers became annoyed at the queue jumpers and decided to impose a sanction all their own. I also suspect that these truckers were talking to each other on the radio because, within a few minutes of the start of the queue-jumping, a number of trucks moved to the right in a coordinated manner designed to stop anyone else from trying to jump ahead and boxing in those drivers who had already begun the process. It was almost a truck ballet. And it was effective. Within a few minutes, the queue-jumping ceased and the line began to move forward again. I suppose technically this might have been an example of minor vigilantism. But whatever it was, it was wonderful so far as I was concerned both as a legal scholar and as a driver who wanted to get home. Bravo to truckers everywhere!

— Mike Hoeflich, a distinguished professor in the Kansas University School of Law, writes a regular column for the Journal-World.