Favour protected over private

Trying to make a contextual model validation plugin for Laravel but can not depend upon this library as I wish to override the getRulesInContext method to use array_merge_recursive, this was general rules for save can be defined in default, then specific rules can be defined in create/update and merged in.

Also, I find it to generally be a good idea to favour protected when I am unsure as to whether the method will need to be overridden.