On Wed, 8 Jan 2020 at 14:51, Aris Merchant via agora-discussion < agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 8, 2020 at 9:59 AM Gaelan Steele via agora-discussion > <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > > > > I’m intrigued by the idea. I’m a little concerned that it’s TOO > vague—are these rulings CFJ-like (a means of agreeing on what happened > platonically, but with no actual platonic effect) or ratification-like? How > is arbitrariness and capriciousness defined/judged? What about “official > area of concern?” > > I was afraid someone would say that. I just thought it might be fun to > have major, game altering precedents. Arbitrariness and capriciousness > kind of have to be vague (and is in the US legal system too), and it > wouldn't make much sense to write out the official areas of concern of > each office, though I could (maybe I'll put the current ones in a > comment). I was going to leave the platonic/pragmatic thing for CFJs, > but it would probably be better to just explicitly define it as > platonic. > My feeling was to go into the area of binding *interpretations*, which can't inherently change underlying facts, but become conclusive on questions of law and mixed law and fact (that is, how the law applies to the facts). So for instance, in my recent bid "for Bernie", the ruling would be binding that I was unsuccessful. It would represent a major departure from the rather pure philosophy of platonism that has characterized Agora for years, but one that in actual judicial philosophy is hardly controversial. If we want to do it gradually, probably the first step would be to figure out how to codify this into the ruleset, likely adjusting ratification and inquiry cases appropriately (and possibly codifying an approach to "is history part of the game state"). We could then proceed to devolve some interpretation power onto officers, likely in a very limited extent at first, without dislodging inquiry cases as being the final deciders if needed. Then we could expand the scope of officers' interpretation powers, eventually giving them exclusive primary jurisdiction once we're sure that, as G. warns, we have sufficient protections in place that we can't get Lindrumed (or that if we do, it was a genuinely skilled scam and not just lazily copying Lindrum's arguments). A parallel effort that would likely help would be unifying limited-scope legal documents, along the lines of Jason Cobb's ideas. I don't think the exact ideas there capture what I'm thinking of, but more along the idea of "scoped" law. Regulations are a form of scoped public law, while contracts are private law scoped to the parties. This might allow a framework for e.g. contracts defining things that are like-assets-but-don't-quite-follow-the-asset-rules, or for more experimenting with different types of proposal voting schemes without having to worry about the risk that the core rules become too much under the control of one or more players. One common feature of administrative law is that administrative actors can't make rulings of general importance, such as on the interpretation of a nation's constitution. A good scoping system could be used to help make this explicit, such as by providing some limited scoping of an officer's authority to interpret rules that, while they directly affect the area of the game for which they are responsible, are fundamentally questions about the core rules generally. Alexis
