On Wed, 1 Jan 2014, omd wrote: > Also, I think that in some sense, we already have a way to bury > legalese in a separate document: judgements themselves. This has pros > and cons compared to actual binding text - judgements can get stale > relatively easily, are harder to search, and have a habit of becoming > contradictory, but don't need to be explicitly updated when the > precise mechanisms in the rules change - but I think the CFJ system in > general has been neglected of late.
Yes, I should have been clear in my earlier email. As you say, we've currently made many processes (e.g. support/object) so procedural that the words have lost their meaning as ais523 says. But if we removed some of that procedure, we might rely on some common sense uses of those words again. And I agree with you wholly on judgements. One thing that I think we tend to do here is not trust judgement enough, actually. Once a judgement has "solved" a problem via precedent, we don't find that good enough, but feel the need (often) to legislate the judgement so "the scam doesn't happen again". But whereas the judgements, left as judgements, are flexible at dealing with edge cases (even if that ends up with contradictions at times between judgements), making the edge cases part of legislation makes the rules both more complex, less flexible, and less a case of common sense. In terms of catching up with CotC, I'll make another try myself. My efforts foundered when I realized my university web host doesn't support postgres, and I'd have to rewrite things as mysql to be the host - more time than I've got. -G.
