On 1/23/2020 4:19 PM, Aris Merchant via agora-discussion wrote: >>> 8298 Aris, [2] 2.0 Administrative Adjudication v3 >> AGAINST. Two concerns here. (1) I have no idea what "tracked along >> with judicial cases" means in terms of practical tracking, and don't >> think it should be the Arbitor's job (if that's what's meant), and (2) >> officer discretion should mean that there's some means for a current >> officer to overrule a past officer (whatever you call reverse >> precedent where the new takes the place of the old). > > If it's going to set a judicial precedent, why shouldn't the Arbitor > track it? Though you're Arbitor, so I'll defer to you on that; keep in > mind that it's a SHOULD.
On the practical side - you say they should be "tracked like cases". I feel that they shouldn't have their own CFJ-like numbering system or anything like that. I don't think we should "bend" the current case archive format (which can be automatically parsed with little error back to 1998) to accommodate this new thing. Further, the only tracking that cases actually have (legally) is the Weekly Report. So do you mean "put in the weekly report"? If you want it there (sure, why not?) say it's part of the weekly report. But conceptually, I think these play the same role that standing comments have in reports - for example, when the Tailor maintains a short unofficial summary of "how to win a ribbon" in eir report. They tell you how to interpret the report itself and actions you can take to change the report. So they go better with each individual report. I think if they're in an Arbitor's list separate from the individual issues they're interpreting, they'll get lost. > the new officer can simply issue a new memorandum, if the > matter continues to be a concern. The proposal reads the exact opposite of this to me. It says: "The memorandum is binding as precedent". This, to me means, quite explicitly, that the old memorandum was binding on the new one, and if I were a judge with an old one and a new one that conflicted, faced with that exact language I'd opine with the old one. Also, it just occurred to me. This "defines" a memorandum as a "binding precedent" at power-2. R217, which lays out the full judicial order of considerations (and says "past judgements, not past precedents" btw), is power 3. I think that this crosses the line of being an "overruling" definition as per R217 (defining a memorandum to be a judicial precedent for the purposes of R217) and so would need to be at the higher power, or else the memorandum needs to be put somewhere in R217's hierarchy of what to consider (also needing power 3 to do).
