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                               CFJ 916

"An Officer is required to take action on a message pertaining to the
 duties of eir office only if the message has been sent to either the
 Public Forum or the preferred e-mail address of said Officer, as
 listed in the Registrar's Report."

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Judge:       elJefe

Judgement:   FALSE

Eligible:    Andre, Antimatter, Blob, Chuck, elJefe, favor,
             General Chaos, Harlequin, KoJen, Macross, Michael,
             Morendil, Murphy, Steve, Swann, Vanyel, Zefram

Not eligible:
Caller:      Crito
Barred:      -
On hold:     Oerjan

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History:
  Called by Crito, Wed, 19 Mar 1997 11:00:22 -0500
  Assigned to elJefe, Mon, 24 Mar 1997 10:00:07 +0000
  Judged FALSE, Wed, 26 Mar 1997 20:17:09 +0000
  Published, Tue, 1 Apr 1997 10:00:20 +0100

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Judgement: FALSE

Reasons and arguments:

There are several situations in the Rules in which a message requires
an Officer to take some action.  For example, Rule 1483/2 specifies
that a Proposal comes into being when it is delivered to the Promotor,
and Rule 1036/6 requires em to (among other things) assign it a number
as soon as possible after receiving it.

The Statement seeks to interpret 1036/6 (and others) as not requiring
the action if the message came via a message to several people
including the Officer, other than via the Public Forum.  The caller's
arguments refer to the notion that the Rules do not specifically
mention other communications media.  However, that in itself should
not prevent a Player from delivering text (etc.) using other media, as
per Rule 116.

In fact the notion is not quite accurate, as it appears that Rule 718
explicitly recognizes the possibility of a message sent to more than
one person, but not necessarily the Public Forum.

In any case, a term (such as "message", "received", "delivered") not
explicitly defined in the Rules retains its ordinary meaning as much
as possible, and the Rules explicitly recognize that a message may be
by "any medium or combination of media" as in Rule 478.

As a sometime Officer myself, I sympathize with the idea behind this
CFJ, in that an Officer who wishes to _ought_ to be able to delete
nomic-discussion messages without risk of ignoring a legally effective
message.  However, legislation is required before the Statement could
be considered true.

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Evidence:

Rule 718/4 (MI=1)
Resignation from a Group

      A Player who is a Member of a Group shall be removed from the
      Jurisdiction of that Group's Ordinances when that Player sends a
      message to the Notary and the Vizier of that Group, indicating
      that e is resigning from that Group.  The Ordinances of a Group
      are not permitted to prohibit a Player from sending such a
      message.

      This Rule does not in any way prevent a Player from being
      removed from the Jurisdiction of a Group's Ordinances by other
      means specified by the Rules or the Ordinances of that Group.

      This Rule defers to all other Rules which do not contain this
      sentence

History:
...
Amended(1) by Proposal 1760, Oct. 21 1995
Amended(2) by Proposal 2563, Apr. 6 1996
Amended(3) by Proposal 2725, Oct. 23 1996
Infected and Amended(4) by Rule 1454, Feb. 28 1997, substantial
  (unattributed)

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(Caller's) Arguments:

These are the only two communications media specifically recognized by
the rules.  As such, whenever the Rules state that an Officer must
take action when a message has been sent to em, it is only possible to
construe that a message has been legally sent if it has been sent via
one of these two media.

I note that Rule 478 refers to "any medium or combination of media",
but only with respect to sending a message to the Public Forum.

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