Quote Originally Posted by veti View Post
Meh. I'd say the appropriate rule is to give up on "he and I", and just decide that anytime there's an "and" in the clause, the dative is correct. "Descriptive not prescriptive", right? Most speakers naturally say "him and me", the only reason they make the opposite mistake is because they've been corrected from that natural habit. So let's just stop "correcting" them.
That's an insane rule, though. Changing cases based on the presence of a particular conjunction just muddles everything up more.

Especially since the "dative", in English, has been functionally obsolete for hundreds of years and its properties folded into the objective case, so what would really be happening is muddling subjective and objective pronouns based on arbitrary convenience for some (by no means all) speakers in some instances. Would it only apply to "my friend and I" phrases, or be a general rule for any situation with "and". And what about other conjunctions? Or plurals in general?

It would just add to the heap of ridiculous exceptions that makes English such an awkward language, and cause more problems than it would solve for anyone actually paying attention to the grammatical structure of what they're saying. And anyone not paying attention to that isn't going to care anyway either way.

While we're at it, can we also decide that "is" is a proper transitive verb and its object should be in the dative also? How many times, in real life, have you heard anyone say "It was I?"
Quite a lot, as it happens.