On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 5:45 PM Yachay Wayllukuq via agora-discussion
<agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote:
>
> That's pretty fascinating.
>
> Are there any other notable "unwritten rules"? Precedents or other thing
> that are, in practice, as strong as actual explicit ruletext?
There should be nothing "as strong as actual rules text". If a rules
text directly contradicts a CFJ or our common way of doing things
("game custom"), the rules text wins (see Rule 217).
The issue is with all the places the rules are silent or ambiguous,
which especially happens with qualitative words. What makes something
"clear and unambiguous"? If an officer publishes "a report" but
leaves something out, does it count as a report? For the purposes of
R2221, when is something a "dialect correction" versus an actual
change in the rule? Etc. Many of these things are "hard to define
in words, but we know it when we see it".
Those sorts of interpretations have built up a lot over the years into
a kind of common law and a set of examples (e.g. examples of which
communications were clear and which were not). Importantly, those can
always be changed via changing the rules text, or through a CFJ that
says "those past CFJs were wrong". Since resolving all of these
issues are ultimately consensus (via choosing not to appeal
judgements) or democratically decided (via Moots), their sole "power"
is the power to persuade, and the power to serve as predictions[0] of
what the likely consensus outcomes will be the next time that
controversy comes up. The flip side is those "predictions" can turn
into "self-fulfilling prophesies" if not revisited with fresh eyes
from time to time.
[0] see Holmes, "The Path of the Law" (pdf:
http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/LCS/palaw.pdf)
-G.
