[quote="Diderot Mirabeau":2wshrbb0]Like you Ashcroft I much prefer a judiciary system founded on explicit legal texts and procedures rather than on ad hoc decision-making. However, I believe that in this matter it is not as black and white a question as your survey tends to depict it as. Justice's initiative illustrates this nicely.[/quote:2wshrbb0]
Have you read my response to his suggestions? If so, what is your view on the points that I raise in that response?
[quote:2wshrbb0]Most certainly the goal for the development of a judiciary for Neufreistadt should be something as evolved as what you have proposed Ashcroft. However, I think that the most viable route for the political experiment that is Neufreistadt is to evolve gradually and in small steps considering that we are in relatively uncharted territories when it comes to the question of how to conduct governance in a virtual community consisting of some 30+ individuals. In other words we cannot afford to make too many assumptions in developing our frameworks of governance and it is therefore prudent to adopt an approach similar to that of a man walking on thin ice - i.e. one small step at a time.
I think a usual metaphor to consider for our development is that of a society experiencing a historical progression from a primitive stage to a more advanced one.
When it comes to the judiciary it would be fair to say that we are at the moment pretty much at the feudal stage and that we are taking a first step in the direction of a more developed judiciary necessitated in part by the implementation of our commercial legislation and the development of other governmental institutions.[/quote:2wshrbb0]
What you are suggesting is really quite unclear, I am afraid. Justice Soothsayer has taken parts of my original [b:2wshrbb0]Judiciary Bill[/b:2wshrbb0] and made them into separate bills. As I have explained very carefully in my response to his post, if they are all passed together, there is no advantage in doing it that way, and if some are passed, but not others, the resulting system becomes incoherent and unable to operate at all. I explain that in some detail in response to Justice's post. Nobody has sought to reply to my response, arguing against what I suggest. This is such an important topic that public debate on the point is essential. Why do you reject each of the arguments that I advance in that post?
The point is that some changes can only work if they are all done at once. One cannot move house one room at a time, which is what Justice appears to be trying to do with his split bills. I still cannot conceive what advantage that there would be to having some of his bills enacted and not others. What would you suggest enacted first? What woud be the advantage of having that/those enacted, but not the others?
Incidentally, feudal legal systems were far, far more complex both than the legal system that we have now and the one that I propose: they were filled with arcane rules (the law of heraldry alone would take up multiple volumes). I quite agree that we are a small community in its early stages and that we need a legal system to match. I believe that the legal system that I propose does match it. I have yet to see any reasoned arguments, as opposed to mere assertions, to the contrary.
[quote:2wshrbb0]As I've made it clear before I'd therefore personally prefer that we create a legal system that is fair, light-weight, transparent, codified and most important of all understandable by all and not dependent on a heavy expenditure of resources either in terms of monetary expenses or the time devoted to it by its citizens.[/quote:2wshrbb0]
Again, I agree, and I think that the system that I propose, as I propose it, is all of these things. Why do you think differently? As stated above, this issue is an extremely important one to debate publicly, and I am very disappointed so far that people have not responded, either in agreement, or with reasons for disagreement, to the my response to Justice's original proposals.
I think that breaking it down into little pieces and passing it bit by bit will not acheive the objectives that you seek above: an incoherent system will not be fair because it will not be functional, nor will it be understandable by all, since an incoherent thing cannot be understood by anybody. It will require far [i:2wshrbb0]more[/i:2wshrbb0] expenditure of time than the system that I propose because there will need to be lots of debates, for each individual bill, and lots of implementation procedures, instead of one. There will be far [i:2wshrbb0]more[/i:2wshrbb0] changes (in that there will be a far greater number of different states of our legal system as time passes), making it far less clear to everybody what is happening. Resources will need to be expended each time that there is a change to catch up with it. It is more efficient to change all at once. Furthermore, the [i:2wshrbb0]substantive[/i:2wshrbb0] differences that Justice's system proposes (that nobody at all seems to have talked about), such as requiring the Scientific Council to consider [i:2wshrbb0]every[/i:2wshrbb0] judicial appointment would require far [i:2wshrbb0]more[/i:2wshrbb0] expenditure of time of existing citizens than the streamlined, autonomous Judiciary Commission that I propose. Again, I am concerned that this issue i s not being debated.
[quote:2wshrbb0]On the basis of the above I think that an approach that strives to modularise the components of the system and ideally also to implement them gradually as we gain experience and are able to move forward without to many unqualified assumptions is preferable to a big bang implementation of a highly evolved system possible embodying a lot of implicit assumptions about external circumstances that might be suitable in an RL UK societal context but not necessarily in a context of an international, virtual community of 30 inhabitants run by a government with limited powers of enforcement.[/quote:2wshrbb0]
I am at a loss to think what wrong assumptions that the system that I propose might be making. In my original post, I wrote at great length about how the system that I propose will fit in with our community, both in terms of its ability to use no more resources than we have (it will need just one judge who does no other official job, and, if at all possible, one clerk who can easily do other official jobs) at our current size, and can expand gradually as needed, and in terms of the way in which the limited powers of enforcement that we have would be used, how coercive orders (banishment and forfeiture) would be used to back non-coercive orders (such as fines and the payment of compensation), and how those are sufficently effective to make the legal system functional, and, although not as effective against non-citizens as we might like, certainly not wholly ineffective agains them. Can you identify what questionable assumptions that my system makes? If you cannot, are you not the one who is making the assumptions?
I am very concerned that there is insufficient debate here about people's concerns about the system that I propose: since I am at a loss to understand many of the concerns that are being raised, I rather suspect that they arise out of misunderstandings that can be corrected. If the concerns are genuine, then the only way that I will be able to understand what they are, exactly, so that I can modify my proposals accordingly (as I have done in response to a number of concerns and suggestions) is to understand the reasoning behind them, including the reasoning for rejecting any responses that I might make to the original expression of the concerns.
