status: https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/#3491
(This document is informational only and contains no game actions).
============================= CFJ 3491 =============================
An Agency's Head is currently defined by the rules.
======================================================================
Caller: grok
Judge: ais523
Judgement: TRUE
======================================================================
History:
Called by grok: 19 May 2017
Assigned to ais523: 19 May 2017
Judged TRUE by ais523: 19 May 2017
======================================================================
Caller's Arguments:
It appears that, according to Rule 2467, an Agency's Head is not
selected in the Agency creation process--only a Director. I thought
this strange. So I did some research and found this message in the
archive:
> I retract this proposal and resubmit it with the indicated typo
> correction and with every instance of "Head" replaced by "Director".
This retraction became an official announcement and proposal on 16
Sept 2016. We don't end there, however.
All previous versions of the Agencies proposal were retracted and
re-submitted on 16 Oct 2016. This submission contained the full text
rather than a "find and replace" as was done on 16 Sept, but the full
text only replaced the first instance of "Head" with "Director." It
fails to replace all subsequent instances of "Head," leaving three
additional references to the "Agency's Head."
This version was adopted as the Rule 2467 we know. Although this may
have been a typographical error or clerical oversight, it is now
written into law. Thus the questions, and my suspicions:
I am led to believe that the Agency Head and Agency Director may not
have the same powers.
I also suspect that while there are powers granted to an Agency Head
and maybe some contextual evidence of its existence, the specific
designation of "Agency Head" may not be currently defined by the
rules.
======================================================================
Judge's Arguments:
The first issue to check here is whether Agencies even /have/ Heads.
The answer to this is clearly "yes"; rule 2468 defines it as ruleset-
tracked information (and thus rule 2125(c) defines any attempt to
change the information as regulated). Rule 2467 gives a list of
"properties" of an Agency (title, Agents, Powers), but rule 2468
strongly implies (twice) that the identity of the Head of an Agency is
not one of its properties (and rather, is separately tracked
information). As far as I can tell, the only security on an Agency's
head is rule 2125; rule 2467 defines restrictions on changing an
Agency's properties, but that wouldn't apply to the Head.
I see no reason why an Agency's Head and Director would necessarily be
the same person; nothing in the ruleset states that they are, and the
words aren't synonyms in standard English usage. The Director appears
to have no gamestate relevance other than to identify the person who
created the Agency.
As such, the remaining question is simply to determine who an Agency's
Head is. As far as I can tell, this is completely unspecified in the
ruleset, meaning that we fall back to rule 217. Game custom is for the
person who created an Agency to be the person who can be acted on
behalf of. Common sense and the best interests of the game both imply,
at least, that the Head of an Agency can't initially be a person /other
than/ its Director; being able to create an Agency that could act on
behalf of someone else is both ridiculous and obviously exploitable. I
don't think there are any relevant past judgements.
This means that I think the situation works as follows: An Agency has a
Head, and a Director; the Head is /initially/ equal to the Director,
but the two could theoretically diverge over time (in fact, we already
have a rules-defined mechanism for changing an Agency's Head: manually
ratifying the Superintendent's report). This makes the verdict of both
CFJs TRUE.
Nonetheless, the rules in question are clearly unclear and should be
fixed.
======================================================================
