On Thu, 2019-06-13 at 14:52 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote:
> "understood" :)
>
> To fill this out, at one time we had a more strictly-structured
> judges' rota system that used a bunch of puns on the "bench" concepts
> with switches on whether a judge was "sitting" or "standing" and
> "lying down" IIRC that indicated how recently e'd been a judge.
> Actually relevant given omd's post on judicial reforms, as I was
> playing with the idea of trying such a rota again (informally, or if
> there are judicial reforms in the air via proposal).
If we bring the Standing Court back, I'd recommend doing it in such a
way that violations of the fairly complex rota rules are a CAN but
SHALL NOT thing, rather than making the assignment fail altogether.
That thing was an excellent example of the Agoran tradition of giant
nests of puns that last for years, but the actual mechanics could
easily get out of sync due to missing a judge.
(Incidentally, it strikes me that there's something of a back-and-forth
between high and low levels of officer discretion. The Standing Court
was definitely at the "low end of officer discretion" end of the scale,
and the relevant officer was called "Clerk of the Courts" for a reason.
Meanwhile, our current system encourages the Arbitor to be capricious,
but in practice there are limits to that because they might end up
getting voted out if they take it too far.)
FWIW, having stricter judge rotation rules is probably only interesting
if the act of judging is tied to the economy somehow, otherwise it
basically just reduces flexibility for no good reason.
--
ais523
