Hello,
I am going to be a new citizen in Colonia Nova. (I'm currently looking at a nice little house across the streeth from the amphitheater.) I am currently slogging through these forums and will post some substantial messages in them this weekend and over the next few weeks. Therefore, I think a self-introduction is in order so that people don't think, "who is this guy?" While I have met many of you in the Sims, I wanted to intorduce myself in these forums as well.
Like Ashcroft, I am a trial attorney. My practice primarily involves commercial litigation -- and more specifically involves construction, real property, environmental, and natural resource litigation.
However, unlike Ashcroft, I am an American and I make my home on the shore of the other Ocean (in Olympia, Washington to be exact).
I specifically chose Colonia Nova because it is a self-described Colony. My family left England to set up a separatist community in Leiden, Holland in the early Seventeenth Century. Not finding Holland any more amenable than England, they sent my ancestor, Robert Cushman, to negotiate with the King of England for a right to found a community in Virginia. He received a Charter to do so, and the community set sail in two ships. The one my ancestor was on, the Speedwell, sprung a leak and had to turn back. The other one, which you have probably heard of, got lost on the way to Virginia, landed on a rock in what is now Massachusetts. where the colonists built a church and a brewery, the combination of which led to their decision to abandon their promise to the King, whom they didn't like anyway, that they would settle in Virginia. (My ancestor arrived the next year).
Thereafter, my specific side of the family continued to be freespirited. My namesake ancestor was eventually excommunicated from the Puritan Church and had to leave Massachusetts. Over the next few generations, seeking to escape the burden of a centralized government, my family moved ever-farther west until we found ourselves stuck up against another ocean.
Anyway, the CDS project is a fascinating one -- one that allows us to try and test assumptions about democratic civil government in real ways not available in the nonvirtual world. I look forward to citizenship and the discussion of these forums.
Beathan Vale
It is certainly good to have more from the legal profession here. I do hope that you set up that law firm 
