On Thu, 2023-05-18 at 14:01 -0700, Kerim Aydin via agora-discussion wrote:
> On Thu, May 18, 2023 at 1:32 PM ais523 via agora-discussion
> <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote:
> > That said, I suspect the word in R2029 is currently undefined: I don't
> > think "a definition that was in place at the time the rule was adopted"
> > is one of the things that we can legally use to interpret the rules.
> > (In fact, given that rules of lower power can't outright define terms
> > in higher-power rules – just clarify them – it may be very hard to
> > define a term in a power-4 rule at all if it has no common meaning, and
> > after this much time, I doubt it has a common meaning.)
>
> It was CFJ 2585, and you (Judge ais523) found the exact opposite of
> what you just said above. In
> https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/?2585, Judge ais523
> wrote:
>
> > However, by the implicit mention in CFJ 1881,
> > and the explicit precedent of CFJ 1534 (that in a rule of historical
> > significance such as 104 or 2029, terms used in the rule have the
> > meaning they had when the rule was created), not to mention rule 1586, I
> > can only conclude that "marvy" in rule 2029 has the meaning it did when
> > the Fountain was created.
This is a nomic, and rules change over time! I think my ruling in CFJ
2585, based as it was primarily on CFJ 1534, missed that the precedent
of CFJ 1534 was probably no longer relevant (and suspect that it may be
incorrect). The judge of CFJ 1881 may have made the same mistake.
At the time of CFJ 1534, rule 217 looked like this:
All Judgements must be in accordance with the Rules; however,
if the Rules are silent, inconsistent, or unclear on the
Statement to be Judged, then the Judge shall consider game
custom, commonsense, past Judgements, and the best interests of
the game before applying other standards.
This is much more permissive than the current rule 217: in addition to
applying only to judgements, it explicitly mentions "other standards"
which can be used in cases where none of the four main tests work.
At the time of CFJ 1881, it looked like this, somewhat more similar to
the current version:
When interpreting and applying the rules, the text of the rules
takes precedence. Where the text is silent, inconsistent, or
unclear, it is to be augmented by game custom, common sense,
past judgements, and consideration of the best interests of the
game.
but I'm not sure whether the judge noticed that the change might
potentially cause the precedent of CFJ 1534 to no longer apply.
Additionally, CFJ 1534 was itself a judgement based on rule 217 tests,
specifically the best interests of the game: that ruling that Michael
Norrish had *continuously* been the Speaker since the start of Agora
would break everything (the office of the Speaker used to be *much*
more important to the functioning of Agora than it is nowadays), and
thus in cases where rules were unclear, it was better to rule that
transferrence of the Speaker worked correctly. This means that the
precedent might not apply to cases where the the rule 217 tests leaned
in a different direction.
There's also the factor of "this fits too perfectly to not mention":
the rules in place at the time of the Town Fountain's construction were
repealed at the time of CFJ 1881, but by the time of CFJ 2585, the
underlying rules had been re-enacted in pretty much the same form as
they had originally. As such, the old definition of "marvy" was
possible to apply to the rules at the time more or less directly. I
suspect that the me of 15 years ago would have been so excited that the
precedent *could* be applied in this way, that I didn't stop to
consider whether I *should*; in fact I suspect that I read the relevant
old judgements from the FLR annotations rather than actually reading
the judgement itself to see if it were still relevant. (My argument to
rule 1586 seems wrong, given that "marvy" wasn't rules-defined at the
time.)
Or perhaps this is just a case of "the ais523 who has been following
Agora for over 15 years spots things that the ais523 who had been there
for only one year didn't".
Apparently I can still in theory appeal the CFJ, but would require 728
support to do so, which might be hard to obtain in the current
gamestate. So we may just have to leave the precedent there.
--
ais523
