On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 12:46 PM, Kerim Aydin <ke...@u.washington.edu> wrote: > I remember, when Kelly was around, at one point someone asked her about > why a particular pair of clauses in the U.S. Constitution (I forget > which) weren't treated as a paradox. She just laughed and said in > essence "they just aren't." Not satisfying! (see e.g. the famous > story on Godel's U.S. Citizenship).
This is, I think, due to a rather nomic-al invention of treating the rules much more strictly than the law does. While it's true that loopholes do exist in real law, the (common law, anyway, which is probably the driver of discussion here) courts are generally much much less likely to interpret laws with a prescriptivist approach, because of the contexts surrounding their creation and their enforcement. Historically, common law courts have been charged with developing law in addition to enforcing it, statute is used as a tool to deal with the failings of common law (to change the law directly, to establish certainty in a new frontier of law, or to prescribe niggling details). But the statute is far from perfect, and this is supplemented to a great degree by the binding decisions made by the Court. This is a vital thing to understand, because for the most part the law relating to precedence of laws is common law, not statute law. Certain laws (the Act of Settlement in the UK, for instance), despite there being no provisions in them or any other statute granting them paramountcy, are nonetheless regarded as taking precedence over other laws. Indeed, there are situations where common law, never truly codified, take precedence over a statute unless the statute says otherwise---the privileges of Parliament have long been held to be restrained by a statute only if it a very deliberate attempt on Parliament's part to surrender them. However, this is not a particularly apt analogy to Agora, which operates by a doctrine of law much closer to civil law. The only law that is absolute are the rules, and precedents are never binding. This is particularly evident in the law on precedence itself, wherein we generally try not to read additional precedence into rules (see my legitimate paradox win). We do not have the same need to come to an answer, however. In law, the fundamental difference I think is that a court must come to an answer somehow. It is entirely unreasonable for a real-life court to say "Well, I can't give a judgment because of a paradox in the Constitution." The court must try to find the most consistent interpretation, whereas Agora does not see itself as needing to be bound in that manner. Perhaps that's simply an option we should consider: rule by fiat that a contradiction or paradox cannot interfere with the game. tl;dr we need more precedents about precedence -scshunt [N.B. I'm not a lawyer, but I do study constitutional and parliamentary law as a hobby]
