It was the accepted practice to issue rulings in cases argued by Tannaim in the Mishnah and elsewhere on a case-by-case basis. Beginning in the time of Rabbi Yoḥanan, the manner in which rulings were given changed fundamentally, to jurisprudential rules. The new style of rulings brought with it a need to establish additional rules to supplement the basic principles produced by Rabbi Yoḥanan and his school. A highly surprising phenomenon that emerged from the demand for jurisprudential rules was the transformation of dicta specifying the law in specific cases into rules to be followed on a general basis. In this essay, I seek to characterize these specific jurisprudential dicta and to identify a number of legal principles that initially were nothing more than specific rulings, yet were then altered in significance and scope as a result of their inclusion in introductory works and compendia of jurisprudential rules.