Below are protos for CFJ 3668 and 3669. Comments welcome.
**** Proto-Judgement of TRUE in 3668: “Committing a Crime is per se prohibited by law" The Rules define several “crimes.” Many violations of the Rules are defined as crimes—for example, an officer commits the crime of “tardiness” if e fails to perform a mandatory duty on time (Rule 2143), and a player commits the crime of “excess legislation” if e violates the legal prohibition against submitting or pending unreasonable numbers of proposals (Rule 2445). In those examples, the Rules independently and expressly prohibit the criminal conduct. In contrast, Rule 2450 provides that a player who breaks a pledge is guilty of “oathbreaking,” but the Rules never expressly prohibit breaking a pledge apart from defining that as a crime. Similarly, a master who causes eir zombie to break a Rule commits the crime of “masterminding,” but the Rules never say that a master “SHALL NOT” do that. The question, then, is whether conduct defined as a “crime” is per se prohibited by the Rules. In my view, the answer is yes. The Rules do not define “crime,” so we may resort to its ordinary definition. The definition from Merriam-Webster that seems most apt is “an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government.” That definition seems especially to fit here, because Rule 2557 provides that the maximum punishment for an ILLEGAL act is related to what class of “crime” it is. In particular, the Referee CAN impose a fine up to two times the “base value” of a violation, and “if the violation is described by the rules as a Class N crime, then N is the base value; otherwise the base value is 2.” There is no other evident purpose for defining certain conduct as a “crime,” apart from making it ILLEGAL and thereby subjecting the criminal to punishment as a breach of the Rules in proportion to the class of the crime. For those reasons, I find that CFJ 3668 is TRUE. **** Proto-Judgement of TRUE in 3669: “Oathbreaking is per se prohibited by law". Oathbreaking is defined by the Rules as a crime. For the reasons described in CFJ 3668, it is therefore per se prohibited by law. -- D. Margaux