====================================================================== CFJ 1100 Player Swann committed the crime of Contempt by Action. ====================================================================== Judge (2nd assigned): Blob Judgement: FALSE ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Initial selection Eligible: Antimatter, Blob, Chuck, Crito, General Chaos, Harlequin, Kolja A., lee, Macross, Michael, Morendil, Murphy, Oerjan, Steve (* note an error was made in selecting the initial judge; Antimatter and Harlequin were not given a chance of being selected. *) Not eligible: Caller: Swann Barred: - Disqualified: - On hold: elJefe, Swann ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Selection of Judge for reassignment (13 August 1998) On Hold: elJefe, Oerjan, Swann Original Judge: lee Eligible: Antimatter, Blob, Chuck, Crito, General Chaos, Harlequin, Kolja A., Macross, Morendil, Michael, Murphy, Steve (Rolled a 1 on a 0-11 sided dice; Blob is selected) ====================================================================== History: Called by Swann, Fri, 22 May 1998 11:57:05 -0400 Assigned to lee, Mon, 27 Jul 1998 09:45:07 +0100 Judged FALSE, Thu, 30 Jul 1998 23:00:34 -0500 Published, Sat, 1 Aug 1998 16:01:06 +0100 Appealed by Oerjan, Sat, 1 Aug 1998 18:08:40 +0200 Appealed by General Chaos, Sat, 01 Aug 1998 17:43:32 -0500 Appealed by Morendil, Sun, 2 Aug 1998 01:45:02 +0100 Appealed by Macross, Sat, 1 Aug 1998 19:50:51 -0400 Appealed by Crito, Mon, 03 Aug 1998 10:02:34 -0400 Appeal begins, Wed, 5 Aug 1998 09:21:27 +0100 (Board is Steve, Michael, Morendil) Morendil OVERTURNS the judgement, Wed, 12 Aug 1998 05:11:08 +0100 Michael OVERTURNS the judgement, Wed, 12 Aug 1998 09:20:57 +0100 Steve SUSTAINS the judgement, Wed 12 Aug 1998 09:21:27 +0100 (Course of action: reversal - Michael reassignment - Morendil, Steve CFJ is reassigned) Assigned to Blob, Thu, 13 Aug 1998 11:00:58 +0100 Judged FALSE, Mon, 17 Aug 1998 18:11:42 +1000 Published, Wed, 19 Aug 1998 10:20:00 +0100 ====================================================================== Judgement (Blob): FALSE Reasons and arguments: I concur with with the original judge, lee, in saying that Macross' Order were never executed, because they were not submitted directly to Swann. I argue that sending something via the Public Forum is not the same as sending it directly. Intuitively, the Public Forum is an "intermediate step" which makes the submission indirect. Justice Michael, while acknowledging this difference, argues that Rule 478 establishes the legal fiction that the two are indeed equivalent (an argument that wouldn't be necessary if the intuitive distinction didn't exist). The relevant part of R478, I think, is: Sending a message, by any medium or combination of media, to every Active Player, is equivalent to sending it to the Public Forum, provided that the message bears a clear indication that it is intended to be a message to the Public Forum, and it is verifiable that the message was in fact sent to every Active Player. While a strictly logical reading of this rule might take "is equivalent to" to mean that the two methods of submission are interchangeable, I would argue that this is not the natural meaning of this rule. Rather this rule seeks to allow sending directly to all players as an alternative to sending to the PF. It is, in the opinion of this judge, a misapplication of this rule to reverse this, and claim that sending to the Public Forum is an acceptable means of sending something directly to a Player. I do not believe that it is within the jurisdiction of this judge to define in any positive sense what "submitting directly" is, only what it isn't. I will leave it to another judge to determine the matter in greater detail, as becomes necessary. ====================================================================== Appelate decisions ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Justiciar Morendil: I am in agreement with fellow Justice Steve about the substance of lee's Judgement, that is, to interpret "direct submission" as required by Rule 1808 to exclude the Public Forum as a valid means of submission. I further agree that the fact that the Judgement would invalidate a number of Private Orders, mostly Transfer Orders, previously thought to have been valid should not be a primary factor in the Board's decision. (I do not agree, however, that we might just take these erroneous transfers to have taken place and agree to 'ignore the errors' as has been suggested, as this would represent a radical and unwarranted departure from Agoran tradition in taking judicial findings into account; rather; I would hope to see most recent Official reports Ratified so as to correct for all such errors). I also agree that supposed conflicts with prior Judgements are not a major issue. Not only does Steve offer some arguments to the effect that these prior Judgements can be seen as not conflicting; I also believe that the requirement to consider 'past Judgements' in Rule 217 must be interpreted according to the literal meaning of 'past', i.e. 'past Judgements' delivered in the recent past are by necessity of more dubious value in guiding further Jugdgements that those delivered several weeks, months, or years ago and which have demonstrated their usefulness. Where I differ with Justice Steve is in his assessment of Rule 1808 as being, so to speak, unclear in such a way that the Judge was justified in interpreting it as clearly having a different meaning than it was previously thought to have. But in the discussion that has developed since the original Judgement we have come to regard the meaning of the Rules and its wording to have quite different meanings to different Players. In this instance I believe this Board is justified in examining lee's Judgement in the light of all factors mentioned in Rule 217, and overturning it if overall the evidence and arguments against overweigh the evidence and arguments for. A crucial point offered by Judge lee in eir defense of the Judgement (and not, as Steve note, in the Judgement proper) concerned the wording of other Rules that might have been relevant to the interpretation of Rule 1808, and in particular the uniqueness of Rule 1808 in including the phrase "directly to". lee cited several Rules which require a given body of text to be submitted to a particular Player and which have been in the past interpreted as being satisfied by a post to the Public Forum. Judge lee cited Calls for Appeal - not a particularly good example, as Rule 1564 explicitly require such submissions to be to the Public Forum. Other Rules which require a given text to be "submitted to" a particular Player are 1789, 1792, 1726, 991, 1826... In contrast, Rule 1808 is unique in requiring a given submission to be made "directly to" a given Player. But for this argument to be complete, we should also turn to other Rules which are known to require a submission to be made to a given Player, *and* prohibit such submissions to the Public Forum. There is one instance, Rule 1859 (Secret Voting), which calls for messages to be sent to "the Vote Collector of the Proposal, Election, or Referendum _only_." (My italics.) I contend that "directly to X" strongly differs in meaning from "to X only". The former relates to the means of sending a message, while the latter relates to the intended effects. I believe it would be proper for a Judge to offer an interpretation of the "directly to X" constrution, whether this interpretation is such as to include Public Forum postings or not, but I am loath to sustain a Judgement the text of which does not allude to an issue which later emerges as being central to the decision. I therefore see no option but to call for reassignment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Clerk of the Courts Michael: I hereby OVERTURN the decision above. The Judge relies on Rule 1808 specifying that Private Orders be made directly to the recipient Player. However, we know from the higher precedence Rule 478 that sending something to the Public Forum is equivalent to sending it to every player (directly). Therefore, though sending things via a mailing list might seem to be indirect, the legal fiction of R478 makes us conclude otherwise. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Speaker Steve: I hereby SUSTAIN lee's Judgement that the Statement is FALSE. This Judgement is in three sections. In the first section, I explain the substance of lee's Judgement; in the second, I consider three arguments against the Judgement, and reject them all; in the third, I consider the role of the Board of Appeals. 1. The substance of lee's Judgement. Let us begin by examining lee's Judgement itself. On the key question on which the Appeal turns, Judge lee was in his actual Judgement almost telescopically brief. The Order issued by Macross being Private Orders (which no-one denies), Judge lee argued that: Since they were Private Orders, they are executed by submission directly to the Player to be commanded, as per Rule 1808/0. Since these were submitted to the Public Forum rather than directly to Player Swann, these orders were never executed and never took effect. Thus Judge lee interpreted the phrase "submitting them directly" in R1808 as requiring that Private Orders be submitted directly to the subject of the Order, as opposed to being communicated via the Public Forum. From this follows the obvious conclusion that Macross never Ordered Swann to do anything, and so that Swann could not have committed the Crime of Contempt by Action. This act of interpretation was merely implicit in his Judgement. But it was explicit in a defence of his Judgement lee posted to the business list the following day, in which he said: In particular, i looked at the way the word directly is used in Rule 1808/0. In other many places in the Rules, there are specifications about Nomic Entity being submitted to another Nomic Entity, such as a Player or an Officer. Only in this Rule does it specify that something a Nomic Entity is to be submitted directly. The phrase is unique. However i did not find it ambiguous. I reasoned that if posting a statement to the Public Forum saying it was an Order to a Player were sufficient to execute an order, then the language of Rule 1080/0 would be more like the language that specifies how Appeals are submitted to the CotC, or more like the language in many other Rules. In addition, if there were no other more direct way to contact a Player, then the language in Rule 1080/0 would be ambiguous. In an Official report, the Registrars Report, the email address of each Player is given. Thus, in an official document, a way to directly contact a Player, other than a message to their attention in the Public Forum, is given. To me it was unambiguous that according to Rule 1080/0 that Private orders had to be submitted not simply to the Public Forum, but rather to that Player in a more direct fashion. Since the Rule seemed clear to me, i could not even consider game custom. I knew my ruling would be inconvenient, but i felt compelled by the Rules to judge the way that I did. I gave this more consideration than some Players would have, and for that I have been insulted in the Public forum. 2. Arguments against the Judgement considered, and rejected. This reasoning, and the Judgement more generally, has been attacked on three separate grounds. I propose to deal with these in order from the least serious to the most serious grounds. Firstly, it has been argued that if the Judgement is allowed to stand, then a great many Private Orders, including a very large number of Transfer Orders, will turn out to have been invalid, with consequences for the game state that will at the very least be difficult and at worst impossible to calculate. This is true, but it is not an argument for overturning the Judgement. Agora has suffered crises of this kind before and survived them. We do not yet know how much work recalculating the game state will be. Perhaps it will turn out to be achievable after all, and we might decide to attempt it. Or we might decide not to attempt it, or discover that the task is impossible, (for example, because we have no records of whether certain messages were sent to the PF or privately to Recordkeepors), in which case we might be forced to Ratify portions of the game state using the Ratification (or some other) mechanism. We've done it before, and if necessary we can do it again. And in any case, some Players have recently been arguing that we don't have to correct mistakes made in the past but can just let them be and move on (compare the response to Kolja's Judgement of CFJ 1101). Secondly, it has been argued that lee's Judgement conflicts with prior Judgements, in particular with the Judgements returned in CFJs 1094, 1095, and 1097, all of which confirmed that the various Orders issued in connection with the Coup d'Étât were legal and valid Orders. However, none of the Judges in those CFJs considered the question of the correct interpretation of R1808 which lee raises in his Judgement. One way of seeing this situation would be to say that since those Judgements address different questions, the question of conflict between the Judgements simply does not arise. A different way of seeing the situation would be to say that if the point lee is making is correct, then the prior Judges were simply in error in finding those Orders to be legal and valid. But on either way of seeing it, lee's Judgement deserves to be considered on it's own merits. But what are those merits? The third and most serious challenge to the validity of lee's Judgement alleges that lee did in fact err in law, in that he ignored the requirement placed on Judges by R217 to consider game custom. The argument runs that since the meaning of R1808 is unclear, game custom should have led the Judge to conclude that Private Orders can be legally executed by submitting them to the Public Forum since this has been our common practice. This argument can only be as compelling as is its premise that R1808 is unclear. Judge lee considered this question in the defense of his Judgement, quoted above. He said that the wording of the Rule appeared to him to be unambiguous, and hence that game custom did not enter into the question. He is certainly correct in his understanding of R217: if the wording of R1808 is clear, then not only did lee not have to consider game custom, he was not permitted by the Rules to do so, and was in fact compelled, as he claimed to be, to Judge according to the clear meaning of the text of R1808, game custom to the contrary notwithstanding. But is the meaning of R1808 clear? A definitive answer to that question is probably impossible. Judgements of clarity are a vague and subjective matter, about which rational people may disagree. But even judgements about matters of taste can be more or less arbitrary. It is proper for the Board of Appeals to ask: was lee's judgement that R1808 is clear a judgement that a reasonable person was entitled to make? My view as a Justice is that Judge lee was entitled to take the view of R1808 that he did. The construal he gave of the word "directly" as it appears in that Rule is in my view by far the most natural of the interpretations that were available to him. No other candidate interpretation comes close enough to this one to being reasonable to make the Rule ambiguous. Therefore, lee was within his rights as Judge to view R1808 as being clear, and hence to ignore game custom. 3. The role of the Board of Appeals. This Appeal affords me a welcome opportunity to expand upon views I have already stated elsewhere about the proper role of the Board of Appeals. As is probably well known by now, I have often stated (as I did, for example, in my Judgement of the Appeal of CFJ 921) that one should be reluctant to overturn Judgements unless they are mistaken in law or set a bad precedent. In this Judgement we have another application of that principle. My own views on the clarity or unclarity of R1808, whether they are in agreement with lee's or not, are not to the point. What is important is whether lee's view was one that a reasonable person was entitled to take of the situation. In making his Judgement, what lee has really done is contribute a creative act to the game, a considered act borne out of his own particular set of aesthetic responses to the situation. In my view the proper role of the Board of Appeals is to encourage such creative contributions to the game by respecting them as much as possible. ====================================================================== Original Judgement: FALSE Reaons and arguments: The orders that Swann believes e disobeyed were issued by Player Macross in the same message as e registered as a Player. I believe that Player Macross did not hold office and e was not a Judge, and was not on the board of appeals at the time e issued the Orders. Since Macross did not hold office and e was not a Judge, and was not the Board of Appeals, eir Orders were private as per Rule 1794/0. Since they were Private Orders, they are executed by submission directly to the Player to be commanded, as per Rule 1808/0. Since these were submitted to the Public Forum rather than directly to Player Swann, these orders were never executed and never took effect. It is not required that Players obey Orders not in effect, therefore Player Swann could not have disobeyed orders. Therefore e never committed the crime of Contempt by Action as defined in Rule 1811/0. ====================================================================== (Caller's) Arguments: I believe that Macross' Orders were valid, and when I published the message entitled "No New Player Tyranny"-- either through accident or excessive enthusiasm-- I violated Rule 1811 and committed a Class C Crime. I plead no contest and will not appeal the Judge's verdict on the matter. I only hope is that the Agora public will recognize this as a genuine accident and not a willful and hypocritical flouting of the principles I've been wont to expouse. ======================================================================