A defense of complexity

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Post by Ashcroft Burnham »

[quote="Diderot Mirabeau":1e03rsev]Could you please explain to me the logical consistency between your argument that you put trial by jury into your proposal because it was already in the constitution and the fact that your proposal ends up changing more in the constitution than any bill before it? It seems there must be other criteria beyond what is already in the constitution that determines what goes in your bill.[/quote:1e03rsev]

[i:1e03rsev]Read[/i:1e03rsev] what I wrote. The point was that, because the framers of the original constitution had put it in the constitution as a [i:1e03rsev]requirement[/i:1e03rsev], it was not unreasonable of me to assume that they did so having considered the practical aspects of the matter. The point was not that the fact that it was in the constitution already was a sufficient reason by itself to retain it.

[quote:1e03rsev]It seems strange to me that you would discount in advance my opinion as possibly coming from one experienced in planning events in Second Life as you seem to do summarily in the above.[/quote:1e03rsev]

I do not discount any opinion that is genuinely grounded by clear, coherent and precise reasoning. I do not, however, consider mere assertions to have any real value in such a context.

[quote:1e03rsev]We have citizens living in a span of time zones from GMT-8 to GMT+1 or further away if I'm not mistaken. I have had to sit in on SC meetings with 3 participants that had to be conducted at 3AM CET because of the differing time zones and schedules of the participants. I have furthermore experienced almost a full season of RA meetings with just around half of the membership in attendance because of RL scheduling and time zone problems. Do you not think I have experience with the burdersome logistics of scheduling meetings with an international participant body? Do you not further think that you will experience some difficulty in getting up to 7 citizens of this community plus a judge, prosecutor and defense attorney and an unspecified number of marshalls of the peace to be able to turn up at the same time to conduct a court meeting beyond a duration of one hour in order to assess the case of John Random Griefer? Do you not think your problems will be multiplied exponentially when the next case has to be scheduled since John Random Griefer decided to create four alts over the course of a few weeks each of which has to be dealt with on a seperate basis and with a new subset of community members whose calendars need to be scheduled? [/quote:1e03rsev]

(1) We already deal with scheduling problems for our existing branches of government. In spite of scheduling problems, we have (a) a Representative Assembly consisting of five people meeting nearly every week; (b) a Scientific Council consisting of four people meeting intermittently, but that has met twice in the last two weeks; (c) no less than [i:1e03rsev]four[/i:1e03rsev] separate committees on the Colonia Nova project that meet regularly; (d) meetings of the CSDF that take place every week, regularly attended on each occasion by six or seven CSDF members; (e) a seminar series hosted by Rudy Ruml every Saturday, again regularly attended by a goodly number of people; and many more besides.

(2) We are ever expanding our citizenry. We now have 48 citizens, and that looks set to keep growing. The more citizens that we get, the easier that it will be to find people for a jury panel.

(3) Taking into account your original concerns, and suggestions of others, I had suggested that a jury of four might be more realistic. The problems in acquiring a jury of four are likely to be significantly less than in acquiring a jury of seven. The plan would be that seven or eight would be summonsed, and four would be picked from them (in case, for example, one of the parties had a particular connexion with a juror, or it turned out that a juror had a particular connexion with a particular case).

(4) Why do you think that any more than one marshal of the peace will be required at any trial?

(5) You will note that the latset version of the proposals on the old thread to which you responded clearly contemplated having a court hearing only in the unlikely event that a griefer takes the time and trouble, and, in the case of a non-citizen, puts up the requisite security for costs, to respond to an originating notice. For that reason, court hearings, rather than determinations on the papers, would be relatively rare and likely only be used when the parties in question were both serious about the matter.

[quote:1e03rsev]Do I really need to explain it down to this level of detail for you to be able to accept my argument to be even valid?[/quote:1e03rsev]

Yes, of course: bland platitudes and bald assertions are utterly worthless. Only proper, reasoned, detailed discourse has any merit on a matter of this nature.

[quote:1e03rsev]If so then the discussion becomes rapidly too much trouble to be worth it to be frank.[/quote:1e03rsev]

Then why don't you desist in your attempts to unpick what we have spent two and a half months debating and perfecting and accept what two successive meetings of the Representative Assembly has passed unanimously?

[quote:1e03rsev]Is what you are proposing to start out by giving the defendant a high guarantee of a fair trial only to subsequently compromise on this position in the case that it turns out to be too troublesome? In other words those who are fortunate enough to be put on trial first will likely experience a more fair outcome of their trial than those, who are tried subsequently - when the trial by jury system is found out to be too cumbersome logistically to maintain? I am not sure this kind of approach to justice would go down well with anyone subscribing to ideals of fair trials and human rights.[/quote:1e03rsev]

That argument is utterly incoherent: you attempt simultaneously to claim that jury trial is indeed superior to judge alone, then state that, because it may not be practical to have it all the time, we should not have it at all. If something is better, we should have it as much as we can. We do not yet know just how practical that it will be to have trial by jury. We might find out that it can only work occasionally, and we might therefore have to set it so that it is (as in many real-life jurisdictions), used only in the most serious cases. We might find that it simply cannot be done at all, and remove it entirely. But none of that can possibly be a reason [i:1e03rsev]not to try at all[/i:1e03rsev], especially given that it is by no means a foregone conclusion, as I have explained carefully above, that jury trial will inevitably be wholly impractical. If the chance of success is more than merely trivial, the cost of failing having tried only trivially greater than the cost of not trying at all, and the reward of success very great, than what conceivable reason is there not to try the thing in question?

[quote:1e03rsev]None of these rantings actually address my valid proposition that a system be devised by which the caseload is being delegated to judges on the basis of an assessment of the extent to which the judge is internally motivated rather than driven by financial motives. You have furthermore subsequently ignored this proposal completely without ever giving any kind of valid reason why it is not worthy of your consideration.[/quote:1e03rsev]

I expressly stated that I did not fully understand what you had written. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that I did not address the points that you raised. Reading it again, it seems that you are suggesting that judges be allocated cases on the basis of the amount of time that they have available to deal with cases: that seems more like common sense than anything revolutionary. I was certainly not envisaging a system whereby cases were allocated to judges without any regard for their ability to commit time to this project. Did you mean anything other than this obvious point? If so, what, precisely?

[quote:1e03rsev]And how is it exactly that you propose to do anything effective with your judiciary in relation to the problem of John Random Griefer creating multiple anonymous alts and using them sequentially to cause grief to our population? What is it exactly that you propose to do through judicial sanction that will prevent effectively the person behind the avatar to strike again?

Assuming that the answer is nothing - most likely shrouded in an extensive sequence of arguments not particularly relevant to the direct question asked of you - my further question would be why is it worth wasting the time and possibly even wages of the judiciary, marshalls of the peace, four person juries and possibly even a prosecutor to coordinate their calendars to schedule a court meeting to preside over the upkeep of the banishment of an avatar, who will likely never be used again?[/quote:1e03rsev]

I have dealt with this already numerous times. As I have stated numerous times, no judicial system (or for that matter, system of any kind) in SecondLife can render us immune to griefers who create new alts whenever they are banned. Unless the architecture of SL changes, it is an intractable problem. The fact that is an intractable problem, however, is not a reason not to have the judicial system having jurisdiction over [i:1e03rsev]allegations[/i:1e03rsev] of griefing. The common griefer who, when banned, simply creates another alt will almost inevitably just ignore us, in which case there needs to be, as I have stated repeatedly now, no oral hearing, just a very brief determination on the papers by a judge of whether the conduct complained of really is serious enough to merit banishment.

Conversely, there may be people accused of griefing who are wrongly so accused, or at least where, although culpable to some extent, their culpability is limited, and have not come to our sim merely to cause trouble, but have acted somewhat rashly when they are here, who might, but for a system whereby everyone accused of wrongdoing has a right to a trial, be condemned oppressively to banishment without a say in the matter. Any civilised society - and virtual though our environs are, that is exactly what we, the real people who inhabit those virtual environs, between us are - recognises rightly the principle that no person shall be subject to punishment without the right to a trial. What trust can we ask others to place in our fairness and our openness if, for us, justice is only for those who pay to be citizens, or for those who enter into particular sorts of relationships with citizens, with all others being left to the ravages of unmitigated personal authority?

Even if people had the right merely to appeal an otherwise final decision taken by a non-judicial authority-figure, that would still leave at least prima facie final determinations of whether a person should be punished to an entirely non-judicial entity, improperly bypassing all the safeguards necessary and inherent in an independent and impartial tribunal, as required by Art. 10 of the UNHDR, violation of which was the very basis that the Council of which you are a member resubmitted the latest version of the Judiciary Act for rewriting on the last occasion.

[quote:1e03rsev][quote="Ashcroft Burnham":1e03rsev]For those reasons, it most certainly is not a waste of judicial time dealing with abuse cases (whether petty or not), since our ability both to [b:1e03rsev]punish effectively[/b:1e03rsev] the perpetrators thereof by our own means, and our unwaivering commitment to treat alleged such perpetrators fairly are both essential cornerstones of our emerging system of justice upon which our unique and excellent community is founded. [/quote:1e03rsev] (emphasis added)

You use the words but you fail to state how you intend to translate them into action.[/quote:1e03rsev]

I have so stated repeatedly, and you have ignored every such statement. The system that I propose is no less effective at punishing anybody than the system that you propose, or any conceivable system within SL. That is not as effective as we might like, but it is better than useless, since it takes at least [i:1e03rsev]some[/i:1e03rsev] effort for a griefer to create an alt to return, and that griefer may prefer to spend that effort griefing somewhere where he or she has not yet been banned.

But the point is that the benefit of this judiciary is not that it is somehow super-effective at punishing griefers, but that it dispenses those powers of banishment, limited though they are, that we already have in a fair and just way, and it is that fairness and justice, combined with no less effectiveness than a non-judicial system, that is the merit of what I have proposed, and what the Representative Assembly has twice unanimously approved.

[quote:1e03rsev]I fail to see how people's decision to visit a sim is affected significantly by the question of whether they will be banished or not without the right to a hearing. Show me one sim in the universe of SL that has experienced increased visits due to visitors being guaranteed a hearing before being banned?[/quote:1e03rsev]

This is an utterly absurd question since, to my knowledge, there [i:1e03rsev]is[/i:1e03rsev] nowhere in SecondLife other than us that guarantees a fair hearing to those accused of misconduct. There is, therefore, no comparator. My point always was that our community's unique selling point is that we are more than just a themed sim with some friendly people and good events; we are more than just a dispute resolution club for businesspeople who want enforcable contracts; we are the beginnings of something new and unique, an attempt, and a successful one so far at that, to create a true state, true civil society, in a virtual world. That entails so much more than the minimal justice that you propose, so much more than can ever be acheived by confining the operations of our judiciary to a few isolated cases. If our justice does not apply to all, if we do not have full equality before the law, if we do not give everybody the rights to justice and fairness that full access to a properly constituted court system, such as I have designed, entails, then we have failed in our experiment to bring democracy and justice to a virtual world for the first time in the world ever, and failed, not because our project is inherently flawed, but because we will have given up before we started. That is not the spirit in which this community was founded, nor in which this community has grown and prospered over the time that I have been here, nor in which the Represenative Assembly approved my draft of the Judiciary Act unanimously twice in succession, nor the spirit with which we are proposing to grow by enfranchulation and attract a potentially exponentially increasing number of people by that very justice, fairness, openness, democracy and civil soceity that is the very basis upon which we strive to encourage others to join us.

[quote:1e03rsev]Your argument becomes even more contrived when one takes into account that my proposal does not even rob earnest visitors, who consider themselves wrongfully banished of their rightful hearing. All they would need to do is to lodge their appeal with the proper authority.[/quote:1e03rsev]

See above on the requirement for people to [i:1e03rsev]respond[/i:1e03rsev] to notices of banishment for there to be any prospect of an oral hearing, and the importance of having a person's final penalty, whether he or she responds or not, determined by an impartial, independent judge, rather than an adjunct of government, appointed by the legislature or executive.

[quote:1e03rsev]I cannot help but think that if the rest of your judiciary bill is based on argumentation as tenacious yet unfounded as the above then I hope the constitution will help us all.[/quote:1e03rsev]

Not only have I explained precisely how the arguments are not in the least tenuous and unfounded (and, how, in many cases, you have, at the very least, misunderstood many of them), but, as you perfectly well know, the argument above is no more than a deliberately substanceless [i:1e03rsev]ad hominem[/i:1e03rsev] attack with no value whatsoever.

[quote="Ashcroft Burnham":1e03rsev]That may or may not be the case but I thought we were devising a judiciary for the CDS, which is soon to encompass a Roman themed sim.[/quote:1e03rsev]

Is Neufreistadt not the capital of the CDS?

[quote:1e03rsev]Do you propose that the coffers of the CDS should pay 2,700L$ because a particular individual thinks it would be nice to dress everyone up as they do in a British court?[/quote:1e03rsev]

No, I believe that the CDS should pay L$2,700 because robes genuinely enhance the dignity and decorum of a courtroom, because they convey instantly recognisable status upon their wearers, and because a judicial system in which judges are recognisably judges, which bears the visual hallmarks of a real-world judicial system, is more likely to appeal to those who become interested in the whole CDS because of their interest in our judiciary (think, for example, of pictures in magazines) than an unrobed judiciary. Each of those reasons is sufficient on its own.

[quote:1e03rsev][quote="Ashcroft Burnham":1e03rsev]Ultimately, however, although we must of course be careful not to be extravagant and impractical with the designs for our judiciary, what we are planning and seeking to acheive - a professional, independent judiciary for a democratically-governed community in an entirely virtual world - is something that nobody in the world has ever done before. [/quote:1e03rsev]

I could not agree with you more on the above. I hope you still remember them.[/quote:1e03rsev]

Why should I not? What we are seeking to achieve is groundbreaking, and it does not deserve diluting in the name of poorly founded arguments.

[quote:1e03rsev][quote="Ashcroft Burnham":1e03rsev]We are the pioneers of something truly unique and ground-breaking, and we should not, in the name of over-cautiousness, dilute what I hope will one day become renowned the oldest and finest virtual legal system in the world. To be timid rather than bold now is something that we may very well regret in years to come.[/quote:1e03rsev]

That is completely wrong. Nothing will be diluted by rolling out justice one step at a time and trying it in practice rather than by building an elaborate tower of ivory founded on the sand constituted by long, theoretical debates full of assumptions that may appear like facts in the eyes of the writer.[/quote:1e03rsev]

More utterly baseless assertions. I have explained above in great detail exactly why the system that I design, as I have designed it, is as it ought to be, and why the system as you propose it would be utterly inadequate. In any event, are you not admitting by the above that your proposal means that there will be islands of justice admidst a sea of injustice that you imagine somebody perhaps, if anybody feels like getting around to it, slowly populating with more islands one by one until the sea has eventually turned continent? Are you not with what you write above tacitly acknowledging that what you are proposing will result in considerably [i:1e03rsev]less[/i:1e03rsev] justice than what I am proposing? Is that no reason enough in itself to discard what you suggest and adopt what I have proposed, and what has twice been unanimously agreed by our legislature?

You shoud note, incidentally, that the Judiciary Bill as it currently stands includes a proposal for a Public Judiciary Scrutiny Panel. Apart from selecting judges, one of its functions will be to monitor and oversee the judiciary, and write reports on how the system is progressing. Since those who have the power to decide the matter are [i:1e03rsev]already[/i:1e03rsev] in agreement as to the substance of the matter, as they have twice unanimously indicated, would it not be far more appropriate, in the spirit of experimentation that has always been one of our greatest assets, to impliment the judiciary as I propose it and, if and only if substantial problems then arise after sufficient time has been given for our new system to settle in, consider how it might be altered to meet those specific problems? After all, if we do not do that, we will spend a further inordinate amount of time debating the judiciary, when our hard-pressed politicians really need to move on to other pressing concerns.

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Post by Gxeremio Dimsum »

[quote="Ashcroft Burnham":37spx2c1]Is Neufreistadt not the capital of the CDS?[/quote:37spx2c1]

No, it is not. I should hope that the theme of one member sim wouldn't set the tone for the government of sims with other themes.
Now, if all the court business was held in one place, alright then, but I'm not sure that has been decided yet.

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Post by Ashcroft Burnham »

[quote="Diderot Mirabeau":2o4xmjv7]I am not arguing for pick and choose buffet legislation. What I am arguing for is that our judiciary should only be empowered to intervene in cases where there is prior written agreement by two parties that is allegedly violated by one party. The rationale behind this is not to subject citizens to the liability of an unknown number of lawsuits in which they have to appear before the court at a time more likely governed by the priorities of the jury and judge than by the defendant.[/quote:2o4xmjv7]

Why should contracts be the only enforcable basis of a claim by a citizen against another? You have given no reason whatsoever for your underlying assumption that the interests of those against whom cases might be brought necessarily and without further consideration outweigh the interests of those who might otherwise have a good cause to bring cases against others. Why should intellectual property, harassment and defamation, for example, not equally afford citizens rights to claim against other citizens? Limiting justice to contracts is utterly arbitrary and wholly opposed to any fair, just and balanced law-governed society of the sort that I very much hope that you agree that we should be striving to create and maintain.

The whole point of having a judiciary with a wide jurisdiction is to enable [i:2o4xmjv7]all[/i:2o4xmjv7] potential serious disputes between or that concern our citizens to be resolved in a binding way in accordance with law. What you are suggesting is that there should be no resolution at all for a very large number of potential disputes. What do you propose that parties do if they have such a dispute - insult each other on the forums?

[quote:2o4xmjv7]The judiciary should furthermore stand at the disposition of any citizen, who feels wronged by a government decision affecting him or her personally. Limiting the judiciary to be used in this fashion reduces significantly the potential of abusing the judiciary to cause unnecessary division and drown people in bureaucracy.[/quote:2o4xmjv7]

Your assertion that having a judiciary with jurisdiction to resolve all disputes would create any serious liklihood of people succeeding in abusing it to any significant extent in the way that you describe is wholly baseless. Why should this be more of a concern in SecondLife than it is in any real life jurisdiction? Why do you think that, only in our virtual world, and not in the real world, that the judiciary should limit itself so drastically and so arbitrarily? What is the value of having the government decide in all areas but the law of contract who shall be subject to suit? That would be very dangerous indeed given that the liberty and security of any one citizen is in part dependent on the good conduct of all other citizens.

[quote="Diderot Mirabeau":2o4xmjv7] I am sorry but if you think you are getting a better deal by paying extra to have a CDS court of common jurisdiction impose banishments upon anonymous griefer alts after three iterations of bureaucratic court meetings to ensure due procedure then you are quite plainly mistaken.[/quote:2o4xmjv7]

As stated many times now, if you think that the courts will work in this way, you have grossly misunderstood the judiciary as it has been proposed and twice approved by the Representative Assembly, as already stated a number of times.

[quote:2o4xmjv7]A determined griefer will be able to drown in work the CDS court system as it stands since each new alt created by the griefer and used to cause grief in our sim(s) will require the tedious bureaucracy of having a marshall of the peace ban the alt; serve a custom notice; make note of the day of banishment; remember this 14 days later so as to lift the banishment; press the case and present it before the court only to achieve the placement of the alt's name on a list of banished avatars and see the same person appear in the sim the next day under a different name.[/quote:2o4xmjv7]

You greatly overstate the amount of work involved: what is required to ban a person is this:

(1) a marshal of the peace recieves a report of a person causing problems (no different to the regieme under the current arrangement as provided for by the [b:2o4xmjv7]Defence of the Republic Act[/b:2o4xmjv7]);

(2) that marshal of the peace investigates whether to ban the person or not (no different to the regieme under the current arrangement as provided for by the [b:2o4xmjv7]Defence of the Republic Act[/b:2o4xmjv7]);

(3) if the marshal of the peace decides that the conduct warrants a summary banishment, he or she undertakes the tecnnical steps necessary to ban the person ((no different to the regieme under the current arrangement as provided for by the [b:2o4xmjv7]Defence of the Republic Act[/b:2o4xmjv7]);

(4) the marshal of the peace takes a Notice of Summary Banishment form from her or his inventory, fills in the blanks briefly, and drops it on the profile of the banned person, and on the profile of the Chief Clerk to the Judiciary;

(5) the Chief Clerk to the Judiciary checks to see whether a response has been recieved - if it has not, the Notice of Summary Banishment is passed on to the Judge of Common Jurisdiction;

(6) the Judge of Common Jurisdiction decides whether the person shall be banished permanently, or subject to a lesser penalty, or no penalty at all, and the decision is communicated to the Chief Clerk, who organises for the penalty to be implimented.

Note that the [i:2o4xmjv7]existing[/i:2o4xmjv7] arrangement is, in fact, far [i:2o4xmjv7]more[/i:2o4xmjv7] beureaucratic, as it requires the Scientific Council to [i:2o4xmjv7]meet[/i:2o4xmjv7] to review each and every banishment after 28 days. The system that I propose does not, therefore, add a day counting requirement where none existed before, and actually [i:2o4xmjv7]reduces[/i:2o4xmjv7] the need for meetings in those cases, which will likely be the great majority of griefer cases, the defendant simply ignores the notice, or does not respond in proper form.

You also seem to think that additional workloads on people cannot be justified by the fact that those additional workloads (if, indeed, contrary to what I have argued, the workloads, overall, really are additional) are necessary in the interests of securing justice and fairness for all. If you really do not think that some extra work is worthwhile if what it achieves is justice, then what exactly are you doing holding public office in our community at all?

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Post by Ashcroft Burnham »

[quote="Gxeremio Dimsum":23005ql9][quote="Ashcroft Burnham":23005ql9]No, it is not. I should hope that the theme of one member sim wouldn't set the tone for the government of sims with other themes.

Now, if all the court business was held in one place, alright then, but I'm not sure that has been decided yet.[/quote:23005ql9][/quote:23005ql9]

Neufreistadt is the capital of the CDS in the sense that it is the seat of CDS central government. Of course other individual regions should have their own individual themes, but the theme that pervades the central government, and the judiciary, is rightly the theme of Neufreistadt. Furthermore, the plan so far has been to have the High Court in Neufreistadt.

Last edited by Ashcroft Burnham on Thu Oct 12, 2006 8:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Claude Desmoulins »

Ashcroft wrote:

[quote:2q0zg4ai](1) We already deal with scheduling problems for our existing branches of government. In spite of scheduling problems, we have (a) a Representative Assembly consisting of five people meeting nearly every week; (b) a Scientific Council consisting of four people meeting intermittently, but that has met twice in the last two weeks; (c) no less than four separate committees on the Colonia Nova project that meet regularly; (d) meetings of the CSDF that take place every week, regularly attended on each occasion by six or seven CSDF members; (e) a seminar series hosted by Rudy Ruml every Saturday, again regularly attended by a goodly number of people; and many more besides.
[/quote:2q0zg4ai]

The only point I would make here is that none of the meetings you mention are compulsory. Citizens choose to seek a seat on the RA , accept nomination to the SC, join a committee , or attend a meeting or seminar. Jury duty, OTOH, would be required. You may be right that growth in the number of citizens would make it possible to round up a jury at any given time. However, if we set the time for a hearing/trial and then create a jury pool from the citizens available at that time, do we not in so doing taint the pool significantly?

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Post by Aliasi Stonebender »

[quote="Ashcroft Burnham":2iopy4qm]
Is Neufreistadt not the capital of the CDS?
[/quote:2iopy4qm]

It is not. It has merely been the whole [i:2iopy4qm]of[/i:2iopy4qm] the CDS.

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Post by Ashcroft Burnham »

[quote="Claude Desmoulins":1jelw743]The only point I would make here is that none of the meetings you mention are compulsory. Citizens choose to seek a seat on the RA , accept nomination to the SC, join a committee , or attend a meeting or seminar. Jury duty, OTOH, would be required.[/quote:1jelw743]

It would be required, but people would be able to show cause to a judge as to why they should not have to serve (see clause 6 of the Judiciary Bill), and being in an unreasonable time for that person's timezone is certainly one of the factors that would be taken into account in deciding whether to discharge a person from jury service.

[quote:1jelw743]You may be right that growth in the number of citizens would make it possible to round up a jury at any given time. However, if we set the time for a hearing/trial and then create a jury pool from the citizens available at that time, do we not in so doing taint the pool significantly?[/quote:1jelw743]

(1) The primary consideration for the time and date of the hearing would be the availability of the parties and the judge; however, the more judges that we have, the more flexible that we can be. The availability of called jurors to serve would be taken into consideration, too.

(2) I do not see any reason why a jury selected from one broad band of timezones (I do not envisage there ever being a situation where a trial would be scheduled such that a jury would only be able to come from one timezone) should "taint" the jury in relation to deciding the issues in a particular case, since there is no reason to believe that a juror's timezone will have any impact on that person's consideration of the facts of the case.

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Post by Ashcroft Burnham »

[quote="Aliasi Stonebender":rvt0q2ae][quote="Ashcroft Burnham":rvt0q2ae]
Is Neufreistadt not the capital of the CDS?
[/quote:rvt0q2ae]

It is not. It has merely been the whole [i:rvt0q2ae]of[/i:rvt0q2ae] the CDS.[/quote:rvt0q2ae]

What is the capital but the place where the seat of government is located, and where but Neufreistadt does our Representative Assembly sit?

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Post by Aliasi Stonebender »

[quote="Ashcroft Burnham":3khtafqs]
What is the capital but the place where the seat of government is located, and where but Neufreistadt does our Representative Assembly sit?[/quote:3khtafqs]

We meet there because, until recently, there has been nowhere else [i:3khtafqs]to[/i:3khtafqs] meet. Think virtually.

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Post by Ashcroft Burnham »

[quote="Aliasi Stonebender":2mstl161]We meet there because, until recently, there has been nowhere else [i:2mstl161]to[/i:2mstl161] meet. Think virtually.[/quote:2mstl161]

That is the reason why it is our capital, not a reason why it should not be. Why should we not have a capital of a virtual nation, and why should that capital not be the oldest part of it?

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Summarised response to the narrow jurisdiction

Post by Ashcroft Burnham »

[b:1iihkwgy][u:1iihkwgy]Summarised response to arguments in favour of greatly restricting our judicial system's jurisdiction[/b:1iihkwgy][/u:1iihkwgy]

For those who do not have time to read my detailed response to Diderot's post, I summarise below some of the reasons why the arguments that he seeks to make in favour of restricting the jurisdiction of our courts only to disputes between people about notarised contracts, or disputes between people and our government. Anybody with any queries on the points should read the more detaild response before replying, since the points may be addressed there.

1. Despite being posted on Claude's thread, what Diderot has proposed is not a response to Claude's challenge (which Claude is unsure whether it is possible to meet) to find a simpler way of doing the same thing as the existing Judiciary Bill - it is instead an equally complex way of doing less.

2. The proposal to have banishments of griefers decided without any judicial input at all is not only based on a false understanding of how much time would be saved by his proposal (very little, if any), it would also dangerously undermine the principle that is vital for justice that people may not be banished without trial in accordance with law, or consent not to be so tried, and the equally important principle that it should be an impartial, independent judge, not an agent of the government, who decides whether any conduct shall be worthy of banishment, whether the person in question responds or not.

3. The proposal also seems to be based on a wholly unfounded fear of large numbers of people suddenly bringing hoards of unmeritous claims against unsuspecting citizens, and addresses that unfounded concern by preventing anybody bringing any claims, whether meritous or not, except where they relate to notarised contracts or government action. A system that prevents meritous claims is just as bankrupt a system as one that allows umeritous claims. The way that we stop people making unmeritous claims is by having a skilled, professional, independent judiciary, capable of distinguishing between what is meritous and what is unmeritous, and rules (such as the rules that I propose that require an unsuccessful litigant to pay court costs and any costs incurred in bringing or defending the case incurred by the successful party, and rules enabling claims that have no reasonable prospect of success to be struck out at a preliminary stage) that strongly discourage people from bringing unmeritous claims in the first place. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that people are any less likely to bring unmeritous claims about notarised contracts than anything else.

4. The proposal fails to deal with live and pressing issues in SecondLife (and the internet in general), such as intellectual property, defamation and harassment. Any disputes between people about these issues would, on Diderot's proposal, go wholly unresolved. Even the [i:1iihkwgy]present[/i:1iihkwgy] system is not as bad as that: disputes about winding up companies go to the Commercial Court, disputes between people go to the Civil Court or Criminal Court, and constituitonal issues go to the Constitutional Court, all run by the Scientific Council with no rules of procedure. What Diderot is proposing is having our judicial system [i:1iihkwgy]vastly reduced from its present scope[/i:1iihkwgy], and will leave many disputes incapable of being resolved at all. What sort of judicial system is it that leaves pressing and important issues unresolved?

5. The proposal assumes that people will be more put off becoming citizens by the prospect of having claims brought against them (whether meritous or not) than by the prospect of not being able to bring meritous claims against others, yet substantiates that with no empirical evidence (such as market research).

[i:1iihkwgy]Edit:[/i:1iihkwgy]
6. The proposal seeks to address hypothetical problems that have not arisen yet, and may never arise, and seeks to do so by vastly reducing the potential usefulness of the judiciary. There is no need to assume that there will be problems, and that they will not be able to be solved without such measures: the Public Judiciary Scrutiny Panel is designed to be able to monitor the performance of the judiciary and produce reports and make recommendations if it finds problems. Since we have already agreed on the substance of the judiciary (which was unanimously passed by the RA twice), it is far better to wait and see whether any of the predicted problems actualise, and let the PJSP do its job if they do, and make recommendations on how to solve them, bearing in mind the practical experience of operating the judiciary that will be available to them that is not available to us now.

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A Counter-Argument to Complexity

Post by Beathan »

Having worked my way through many, but by no means all, of the discussions in these forums, this discussion seemed like the most logical and sweeping place to begin my contribution. As you might expect, I believe that, all other things being equal, a simple solution is preferable to a complicated one. I will state my reasons for this preference below, but tangentally. The more interesting question is whether, when devloping governmental institutions with an eye towards growth of the jurisdiction of the state, are all other things equal -- or is there some privilege to complexity. I think, when properly analyzed, the privileged place in fact goes to simplicity.

Note, in this discussion, I am not strictly defending less government vs. more government. I think that a small and limited government can be extremely complex, while a large and strongly empowered government can be simple. Rather, I am defending the notion that simple institutions are generally better than complicated ones [i:30e3qhcb]in all circumstances.[/i:30e3qhcb]

Similarly, I am not defending informal institutions over formal ones. In fact, some formal institutions, through their formality, can be very simple in form and function. Further, informal institutions, through their lack of form, limitations, and guiding rules, can be very complicated. For instance, I believe that a group discussion with rules about who talks and how are simpler (easier to follow and understand) than "free-for-alls."

To me, the question of government presupposes that some formal institution is desired. The question is what form this formal institution should take. To me, to offer a loaded analogy, the question isn't whether we want to build a machine of state -- it is an engineering question about how many different, movable, and potentially breakable parts the machine we do build should have.

Litmus test

To me, the key concepts for assessing the effectiveness of an institution in the face of growth are borrowed from IT and Economics -- Scalability and Completeness. An institution is preferable if it is scalable, up and down, so that it can be replicated and implemented in both large and small jurisdictions. An institution is also preferable if it, alone or in combination with sister-institutions, completely addresses the scope of problems (disputes, obstacles, scarceties, constraints) that can face it.

In addition to these concepts, institutions must satisfy two additional tests. First, they must be effective (no just poised to address the problems, but able to do so) and they must be feasible (in the sense that it is possible to implement them, and, when implemented, they must be robust).

These concepts are well-captured, if not explicitly, in Claude Desmoulins initial observation in his post.

[quote:30e3qhcb]From the beginning, the DPU has held as a core value that government is about problem solving. Coming in to the last election cycle, there was broad agreement that the issue facing us was expansion -- How ot make it happen in the short term and how to build a robust enough system to not get overrun by it in the long term.

This sort of burnout can be seen... [proving that despite best efforts of the participants] ... loose and informal systems weren't adequate to get the tasks done ...[/quote:30e3qhcb]

In other words, government is about creating enduring systems and institutions than can solve the array of problems that will face the state even as the state becomes larger. That is, the institutions must be complete; they must be scalable; they must be effective; and they must be feasible.

Further, the concern expressed by Mr. Desmoulins that the institutions "might be overrun" by change must indicate a preferance for stability in institutions over the long run. The more stable institution is the one that more optimally satisfies the four criteria I have identified -- as such an institution will be enduring but flexible and implementable across a range of possible situations and to a range of problems.

Additionally, I am inclined to agree with Mr. Desmoulins's other two points. First, if done well, "it is much easier to plan these systems (exec, judiciary, etc.) before we need them." (However, there is also a danger here that an institution can be created that, through a lack of foresight, failed to anticipate a problem that later arises, which is a problem the institution is charged with solving, but which the institution is ill-equipped to solve. In such case, it is in fact harder to improvise in the face of a dysfunctional institution, which has become entrenched and possibly reified, and which could operate to exacerbate the problem by opposing an effective solution that requires institutional change or a surrender of jurisdiction.) Second, checks and balances are necessary for individual protection, and are inherently complicated because they mandate a division of jurisdiction between duelling institutions which nonetheless must work together (like gears in a clockwork machine).

Thus, it is true that a problem anticipated and solved in advance is less stressful than problem-solving "on the fly." Further, checks and balances divide power in complicated ways, preserving freedom through its very inefficiency by preventing any one institution, if captured by forces hostile to freedom, from using the centralized power and efficiency of the monolithic governmental institution to harm the citizens it should serve. However, these arguments merely establish that we must accept some level of complexity; they do not establish that a more complex institution is preferable. In fact, I would submit that the simplest solution (the one with the least complexity to be effective, scalable, complete, and feasible) is best.

On balance, provided the institution has the tools needed to address the problems it is charged with solving and is set up within limits designed to prevent it from becoming a problem to (a tyrannical imposition on) the citizens it is supposed to serve, a simple institution is best.

As a lawyer, I tend to see institutions in terms of their jurisdiction (what they govern, regulate, or control). I also divide jurisdiction into two categories (from American jurisprudence): subject matter jurisdication and personal (or geographical) jurisdiction. An institution is effective if it can solve problems within its portfolio (subject matter jurisdiction) and domain (personal or geographical jurisdiction) without exhausting itself or developing irrelevancies and vestigal operations.

An institution is ineffective if it is not able to address the problems it faces. For instance, I see that there was a proposal made with regard to the judicial system to limit its jurisdiction to exclude a broad range of disputes, which people would understandably look to a judicial system to resolve. This proposal would have made the judicial system incomplete -- and that would have reduced its effectiveness. Further, such a limitation would probably not have made the judicial system any simpler to implement and operate.

Additionally, I see that compromises, especially involving juries, were reached in the face of the practical limitations facing a community of this size. Such obligations would have likely taxed, diverted, and diluted the energy and will of the community, causing it to fail to meet challenges raised in other areas.

However, I am not sure that the system in place is readily scalable or implementable within the real limits faced by this community given its size and the skillsets of its citizens. In short, I think the judicial system might be too professionalized and therefore too complex.

A professionalized justice system will call upon skills not readily found. We might dodge this bullet in this community, but the principle should be a point of discussion and a cause for concern. For instance, if a system of law is professionalized, any dispute will require a professional (or three people acting as professionals) -- a judge, (and possibly a plaintiff/petitioner/complainant counsel and a defense/respondent counsel). Further, given ordinary human limits, if the community is large, no one person (or three persons) can fill these roles in all cases. Therefore, there will have to be a duplication of function between and among multiple people. If such people are not available, the institution will fail.

Given these concerns, with great interest and some trepidation, I look forward to seeing how the judicial system as implemented operates.

That said, I want to address the point made in these discussions that "complexity decreases predictability." First, I think we should parse this claim between two cases: 1. complexity from informality and 2. complexity from formal institutions producing and requiring professional participants. However, in each case, I think it is fair to claim that complexity does decrease predictability, at least for nonprofessional observers of the institution. Further, this inability of an ordinary person to predict the outcome of an informal system or of a professionalized system is cause for concern and a proper point for criticizing each kind of system.

In informal systems, power is applied by persons based on personal reasons and preferences. Without the limitations of guiding and ruling principles, each person acting for the institution can and will act differently than each other person similarly empowered. The result in such case is inconsistent results -- what the "solution" is is entirely idiosyncratic. Such idiosyncracy is difficult, if not impossible, to predict -- and institutions that behave differently based on which official is acting in any given context, when assessed as an institution, can fairly be said to act arbitrarily.

This arbitrariness is, in fact, a product of the complexity created by a lack of guiding principles. In informal systems of governance, there are in practice as many institutions as there are officials in the institution. An institution becomes schizophrenic in the classic sense. Such an institution, which is a many-headed beast, is very complex -- and this complexity is directly related to its unpredictabiilty.

This problem can be solved by implementing and enforcing guiding principles -- laws. When laws, rather than individuals, rule, the exercise of power becomes predictable. However, this predictability is based on the understandability and accessibility of the law to the person doing the predicting.

Complexities that require professionalization undermine this predictability, at least for nonprofessionals. If some professional skillset is required to even define the problems in an understandable manner, then a person without such skill cannot begin to determine the problem, let alone predict the outcome.

I see this problem all the time in Court. It is frequently the case that the judge and both lawyers understand the legal principles involved such that the Judge's decision is predictable, or at least understandable and sound in retrospect. However, clients frequently are unable to either predict or understand such results. This causes suspicion and discontent -- which is often directed against the client's counsel as much or more than it is directed against either the judge or the opposing counsel.

I see this problem most starkly in criminal law cases -- and it is an outcome of the very certainty and limits of the available results. A criminal verdict indicates that the crime was either proven or not. This binary result, in its simplicity, produces great complexity in the process needed to produce it -- and the effect is that nonprofessionals are often confused, even angered or harmed, by the process.

Civil law, on the contrary, is not committed to binary results. Rather, it is committed to an ideal judgment, which is the optimal and most fair result within the range of the evidence. Because there is flexibility in outcome, the principles and law can be more generally defined. Predictably, I prefer civil to criminal law. I also find that when the principles applied are more general and broadly-defined, they are both more understandable and more useful to nonprofessionals.

This flexibility also aids institutional effectiveness and completeness as I defined those terms above. By not binding a Court to any particular result, courts are empowered to fashion novel solutions to novel problems. However, by requiring that Courts follow generally stated principles of law and that judgments fall within the range of the evidence, the range of outcomes, if not the specific outcomes, become predictable, and the specific outcomes become understandable.

These general principle apply, I think, to all legitmate exercises of power and to all governmental institutions, not merely to judicial power and courts. However, based on these principles, I think the goal of those creating institutions should be to keep them as simple as possible.

Beathan Vale

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Post by Diderot Mirabeau »

Much could be said in extension of this dispute but at the present moment taking into account political reality I believe it is more constructive to let those who desire to endow our community of 50 with a legal superstructure worthy of a small nation state press ahead and experience personally the time and effort required to maintain a newborn judiciary with the jurisdictional ambitions of an adult.

[quote="Ashcroft Burnham":1o00fmr5]My point always was that our community's unique selling point is that we are more than just a themed sim with some friendly people and good events; we are more than just a dispute resolution club for businesspeople who want enforcable contracts; we are the beginnings of something new and unique, an attempt, and a successful one so far at that, to create a true state, true civil society, in a virtual world. That entails so much more than the minimal justice that you propose, so much more than can ever be acheived by confining the operations of our judiciary to a few isolated cases. If our justice does not apply to all, if we do not have full equality before the law, if we do not give everybody the rights to justice and fairness that full access to a properly constituted court system, such as I have designed, entails, then we have failed in our experiment to bring democracy and justice to a virtual world for the first time in the world ever, and failed, not because our project is inherently flawed, but because we will have given up before we started.[/quote:1o00fmr5]

This pompous rhetoric rests on the mistaken or misrepresented premise that a judiciary system with a minimal jurisdiction and lean procedure in terms of the number of hours spent by citizens on producing justice would be the end goal of our ambition to build a functioning judiciary. I do not remember anyone having suggested that we should stop developing our judiciary system at this point.

On the contrary, it would have been wise to develop our legal system gradually on an evolutionary basis taking one step at a time and adapting it to be informed by our experience with a minimal setup, scaling it as the need arises and taking in new resources and tasks as the system proves its worth and ability to dispense justice without paralysing our community from engaging in other tasks because of a disproportionate drain of resources.

Instead what we have now is a monolithic Apollo project based on our knowledge of what may work in an RL jurisdiction, quite likely demanding a disproportionate amount of resources to oversee something as simple as the reclaimation of land from derelict citizens or the banning of John Random Avatar and most likely discouraging people without an RL professional legal background from daring to engage with the judiciary in a facilitative capacity. The system has from its birth become too complicated for most of the electorate to comprehend and we succeeded not as much in bringing justice to our community and stimulating an ongoing debate about the extent to which we can translate justice into a virtual jurisdiction as to empower a new class of professional legal practicioners, who might well end up spending half of their time debating the proper time to schedule a court case at a point where all four jurors can be in attendance.

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Post by Ashcroft Burnham »

[quote="Diderot Mirabeau":36rf541q]This pompous rhetoric...[/quote:36rf541q]

I do not believe that it is worth engaging with somebody who believes in making malicious comments such as this. Why should people respect what you write when you show such persistent and malicious disrespect for others? Your conduct is utterly deplorable, and wholly unbecoming of anybody who holds public office.

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Post by Chicago Kipling »

A number of us could stand to take a step back, take a deep breath, write more concisely and practice a bit more diplomacy - probably myself included.

A good photograph is like a good hound dog, dumb, but eloquent. ~ Eugene Atget
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