[ The main body of this thesis (minus the introduction) was first published in March 2020, as part of Gratuitous Arguments for CFJ 7: https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/?7 and Caller's Arguments for CFJ 3822: https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/?3822 ]
INTRODUCTION
The resolution of disputes, particularly interpretive disputes about the rules, is a key aspect of nomic. If nomic is considered solely as a board game, this aspect represents "house rules" that are developed to allow the game to be played with a degree of consensus between players when faced with textual uncertainty. Grand Hero of Agora Nomic Peter Suber, in eir original version of nomic (https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/nomic.htm), relied heavily on the metaphor of the judiciary as it related to legislative systems:
Nomic includes provision for Judgment (Rule 212), not merely to imitate government on another front, but also for the reasons that government must make provision for judgment: rules will inevitably be adopted that are ambiguous, inconsistent, or incomplete, or that require application to individual circumstances not specified in the rule or not anticipated by the framers. "Play" must not be interrupted; some agency must be empowered to make an authoritative determination so that "play" may continue.
E also stressed that such a judicial system might come to rely on continuity and consistency:
Judgments in Nomic are not bound by rules of precedent, for that would require a daunting amount of record-keeping for each game. But the doctrine of stare decisis may be imposed at the players' option, or may arise without explicit amendment as successive judges feel impelled to treat like cases alike. Without stare decisis players are put upon to draft their rules carefully, make thoughtful adjudications, overrule poor judgments, and amend defective rules. This is one way in which Nomic teaches basic principles and exigencies of law, even while it vastly simplifies.
Clearly, GHAN Suber had not anticipated the tenacity of Agorans when it comes to a "daunting amoung of recordkeeping"! It is not wholly uncommon for Agorans to go back through years of Agoran judicial archives when writing a new judgement. But how consistent has that record been? In Agora, if a rule is changed so that it no longer supports the "existence" of a game-created object - are we relying, in quoting ancient precedents, on judges and judgements that no longer "exist"?
To answer that question, where better to turn than the courts themselves? On March 19, 2020, acting as Arbitor (officer of the courts) I attempted to assign CFJ 7 to a new judge. CFJ 7 had been called on August 5, 1993, just over a month before Agora began, with the notes on the case indicating it had never been judge. Did it still exist as an open judgement, and could it be judged, bringing closure to a case that was over 26 years old? To approach this, there are two questions to consider - the ability to factually resolve the case, and whether the ancient dispute continues to "exist".
QUESTION 1 Do the facts of the case exist to make a determination, and are there appropriate judgements for today that 1993 Agorans would recognize?
Again, the tenacity of Agoran recordkeepors comes to our aid - the information required to judge this case is available. We don’t know the exact ruleset on August 5, 1993. However, Zefram’s archives have two ruleset versions that bracket this time reasonably closely:
Initial ruleset, dated June 30, 1993 Original: http://www.fysh.org/~zefram/agora/chuck0_nr_19930630.txt In evidence as: https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/7_ExB.txt
Ruleset dated August 28, 1993 Original: http://www.fysh.org/~zefram/agora/usenet0_nr_19930828.txt In evidence as: https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/7_ExC.txt
An examination of these two rulesets shows that the rules in question in the statement (111, 112, and 219) did not change during this period; further an examination of two rulesets suggests that other supporting rules on precedence, etc. were relatively unchanged. Therefore, the ruleset to use for judging is relatively clear.
Second, the context for the case is clean. The case involves the resolution of a direct and straightforward conflict between initial rules. This was very early in the life of Agora, and none of the prior CFJs (1-6) touch on the rules involved here. Therefore, this case provides a unique opportunity for a “pure rules” adjudication, made free of the weight of judicial precedent, game custom, or similar historical clouding of the issue.
Third, I believe that TRUE and FALSE are the only 100% consistent judgement options for the duration of the game. In terms of alternatives to TRUE/FALSE, the initial rules included UNDECIDED; in 1995 this was changed to UNDECIDABLE and UNKNOWN, then later DISMISS was the only choice. Choices proliferated in 2006/2007 (including IRRELEVANT), then in 2014 we cut back again to DISMISS only, before moving to what we have today. In 2007, Proposal 5371 (https://mailman.agoranomic.org/cgi- bin/mailman/private/agora-official/2007-August/003161.html) actively replaced some judgements with others with this clause: * For each pre-reform CFJ with an unappealed judgement, the post-reform inquiry case has a judgement assigned to its question on veracity, according to this translation: + Pre-reform FALSE judgement corresponds to post-reform FALSE. + Pre-reform TRUE judgement corresponds to post-reform TRUE. + Any other pre-reform judgement corresponds to post-reform UNDETERMINED.
But this was after several of the changes in valid judgement types mentioned above (for which full proposal texts are unavailable), so it is not clear whether these past alternatives to TRUE/FALSE hold up today or transitioned through different rule versions. Throughout it all, TRUE and FALSE have been consistent. Therefore, a finding of either TRUE or FALSE can be made, with a reasonably degree of factual accuracy, such that either the 1993 Agorans or present Agorans would recognize it as a "valid" consensus judgement on the matter.
QUESTION 2 Does the original case exist? Can it be assigned to a judge?
For these arguments, I will use the term "likely" as shorthand for facts that the documentary evidence supports and for which I found no contradictory documents.
Around March 1 2020, the full text case log for CFJ 7 from the CotC archives appeared as follows:
Call for Judgement from Wes (Thu Aug 5 22:26:27 GMT 1993)
"Because of Rule 111, Rule 112 takes precedence over Rule 219. Therefore, Rule 219 has no legal force."
{ This CFJ was never judged.} https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/7_ExA.txt
The parenthetical {} comment is interesting. Similarly-delimited {} comments appear in several cases in the early CFJ history, and all such comments supply historical context that would be known only after the case was called (e.g. CFJ 28 {} comments document the full history of that case). The current CotC (G.) inherited these case logs from omd, who inherited them from Murphy. Murphy (pers. comm.) recalled that e inherited these cases from Taral. Murphy also noted that some of these represented after-the-events attempts (possibly long after), by an unknown editor, to reconstruct original history. I suggest that the editor had access to archives of the original mailing list (i.e. to reconstruct CFJ 28 history) and performed reasonable due diligence in research before making these annotations. Therefore, it is likely that the indicated statement was called for judgement by Wes on August 5 1993, and that it was never judged.
We don’t know the exact ruleset on August 5, 1993. However, Zefram’s archives have two ruleset versions that bracket this time reasonably closely:
Initial ruleset, dated June 30, 1993 Original: http://www.fysh.org/~zefram/agora/chuck0_nr_19930630.txt In evidence as: https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/7_ExB.txt
Ruleset dated August 28, 1993 Original: http://www.fysh.org/~zefram/agora/usenet0_nr_19930828.txt In evidence as: https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/7_ExC.txt
I assume these rulesets are likely accurate for the indicated dates, and for rules quoted in the below arguments I cross-checked to see if there were changes between the two dates. The initial and 28-Aug-1993 rulesets differed in capitalization of key terms, with the later version capitalizing many terms such as Players and Statement throughout. There were no other changes in the rules quoted below - I quote the initial (uncapitalized) versions.
Mutable rule 213 read: If players disagree about the legality of a move or the interpretation or application of a rule, then a player may invoke judgement by submitting a statement for judgement to the Speaker. Disagreement, for the purposes of this rule, may be created by the insistence of any player. When judgement is invoked, the Speaker must, as soon as possible, select a Judge as described in the Rules. The Speaker must then distribute the statement to be judged, along with the identity of the Judge, to all players.
In the original R213, “Invoking judgement” is done by “submitting a statement for judgement”. Requests (i.e. calls) for dispute resolution are tied to the submission of a single statement, with the intent that the statement is “for judgement”. Further, it ties the selection of a Judge to a particular statement.
If we ignore the all intervening history for the moment, it can be seen that the initial rules for judgement were/are essentially synonymous with the current R991/31 (In evidence as: https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/7_ExD.txt). In R991/31, judgement is initiated (synonymous with the old “invoked”) with the announcement of a single statement, and that statement is tied to the selection of a judge. I posit that these endpoints (again, setting aside intervening history) are sufficient such that the original definition matches the current one within the bounds of the current R1586/9 (Definition and Continuity of Entities), to the extent that these concepts are “the same” in the initial and current rulesets (including concepts like statement, judge, caller, etc.). Further, current definitions such as “open” would continue to apply to old cases.
In the current ruleset, we know from CFJ 3488 (https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/?3488) that judgeship is sticky - you need to be an eligible player to be assigned, but once assigned, registration status doesn’t matter and you are the judge whether or not you are a player. An examination of the original judgement rules (213-217) shows the same situation - judges only change when the officer in charge changes them.
Additionally, if CFJ 7 had a judge assigned at some point in history, and was never assigned a judgement, and that person was never explicitly removed as a judge, it should be POSSIBLE for the current Arbitor to recuse em. The current R2492/4 reads in part:
The Arbitor CAN recuse a judge from a case by announcement, if that judge has violated a time limit for judging the case and has not judged it in the mean time; the Arbitor SHALL do so in a timely fashion after the time limit expires, if able.
At the time CFJ 7 was called, R215 read:
After the Speaker has distributed the statement to be judged and the identity of the Judge, the Judge has one week in which to deliver a legal judgement.
Therefore, there was a time limit back then, and if a judge was assigned, it is likely that the judge violated the original time limit, which would allow the current recusal rule to function such that the Arbitor CAN currently recuse em. (A second possibility is that the original judge is indeterminate, which under the current switch rules would result in the judge being “unassigned” - so ability to recuse would be irrelevant).
It’s also important to note that the “Arbitor SHALL [recuse]” in R2492 is a “SHALL in a timely fashion after the time limit expires”. This SHALL is tied to an Office and a SHALL that didn’t exist when the original time limit expired, so there is no REQUIREMENT for the Arbitor to act to perform recusals on ancient cases. So e CAN recuse an ancient judge who has not judged, but NEED NOT do so (if e does recuse someone to make the case clearly unassigned, R991 does require that e assign a new judge).
So the start and end points are consistent with CFJ 7 being a currently- open CFJ, that (one way or the other) was unassigned after the Arbitor recused the previous judge, and thus a new judge could be assigned to it. The remaining question is: did anything in the intervening 26+ year history of Agora inject a discontinuity that “destroyed” CFJ 7?
First off: I admit this could never be 100% answered. There is always the possibility that a statement like {“There are no Open CFJs”} was ratified at some point to fix a game bug or something. However, given no explicit memory of such an event, I’ve reviewed the history of the judgement rules to determine if continuity is reasonably likely. Starting with the historical annotations of R991/31 as a reference, I used Zefram’s ruleset history: Original: http://www.fysh.org/~zefram/agora/rules_text.txt In evidence as: https://faculty.washington.edu/kerim/nomic/cases/7_ExE.txt
for amendments 1-7 (through 2002) and for later amendments, found each proposal resolution to include proposal actions as well as rule texts in the analysis.
Starting with the original R213 text above, the changes from the historical annotations on R991 were:
Amended(1) by P407 (Alexx), 03 Sep 1993 Changed the judge selection job from Speaker to Clerk of the Courts, no impact on the existence of CFJs or judges.
Amended by P991 'Ultimate Reward for Achievement of Goal' (Fnord.), ~12 Aug 1994 Adds the following text: “No Player shall submit more than five CFJ's per week.” This is an important piece of evidence. It used the term “CFJ” without further explanation, while the main body of the rule still talked about “submitting a statement for judgement.” This indicates that the term CFJ was synonymous with “submitting a statement for judgement” rather than being a separate or new concept.
Amended(2) by R750, around 12 Aug 1994 Infected and amended(3) by R1454, 23 Oct 1995 Amended(4) by P2042, 11 Dec 1995 Amendments 2-4 were minor/not relevant.
Amended(5) by P2457, 16 Feb 1996 Makes “Call for Judgement” the leading term instead of “invoking judgement”. Since the two terms were used simultaneously following the P991 amendment above, this is not a discontinuity. For reference, the full text of 991/5 is: Any Player who seeks formal resolution of any dispute pertaining to this Nomic shall be permitted to request such by submitting a Call for Judgement to the Clerk of the Courts. For the purpose of this and other Rules, the submission of a Call for Judgement shall constitute proof of the existence of a dispute.
Any document submitted to the Clerk of the Courts and which is
clearly marked as a Call for Judgement is a Call for Judgement.
The Clerk shall distribute the text of a Call for Judgement,
along with any additional material submitted by the Caller
(including, but not limited to, Arguments and Evidence) not
later than the time e announces the identity of the first Judge
assigned to Judge it.
Mutated from MI=1 to MI=2 by P2669, 19 Sep 1996 Power change only.
At this point in history (1998) another rule is created that is relevant - Rule 1868. It reads in part: Once assigned as the Judge of a CFJ, that Player remains the Judge of that CFJ until e is recused from that CFJ, or e ceases to be a Player.
Here, explicitly, ceasing to be a player removes a judge automatically (this wouldn’t affect the existence of the CFJ, just the judge). However, it’s not clear what this would have done if the judge of CFJ 7 had ceased to be a player before the rule took effect.
In 2001, this text became: Once selected as the Judge of a CFJ, that Player remains the Judge of that CFJ until e is Recused from that CFJ or becomes ineligible to Judge that particular CFJ. (which included methods other than deregistration, such as zombification, that could make a person ineligible).
In 2007, recusal stopped being automatic: Whenever a CFJ that has not been judged has no trial judge assigned, the Clerk of the Courts shall as soon as possible assign an eligible judge to it by announcement. The assigned judge remains its trial judge until recused.
But the point remains that the judge of CFJ 7 may have been “auto-removed” between 1998 and 2007.
Back to Rule 991 amendments:
Amended(6) by P4170 'Justiciar Opinon' (Elysion), 26 Jun 2001 Added the justiciar option, no effect on continuity.
Amended(7) by P4298 'Massive Judicial Reform' (Murphy), 17 May 2002 Major rewording/restructuring, but fundamental definitions remained intact: Any person may request formal resolution of a dispute pertaining to this Nomic by submitting a Call for Judgement (CFJ) to the Clerk of the Courts. The submission of a CFJ constitutes proof of the existence of such a dispute.
A CFJ should be a single clearly-labeled Statement whose truth
or falsity can be determined using logical reasoning, assuming
perfect knowledge. A CFJ may be accompanied by Arguments,
Evidence, or other related material; the Judge is encouraged,
but not required, to take notice of these things.
The Clerk of the Courts shall publish the text of a CFJ, along
with any additional material submitted by the Caller (including
but not limited to Arguments and Evidence), no later than the
time e announces the identity of the first Judge assigned to
that CFJ.
Amended(8) by P4867 'Judicial Reform 2.0' (G.), 27 Aug 2006
This created a subclass of CFJ called “civil” CFJs that were designed to adjudicate contracts. However, these were a subclass of general CFJs which kept a consistent definition with the past, the resulting R991
was:s
Any person may request formal resolution of a dispute pertaining
to this Nomic by submitting a Call for Judgement (CFJ) to the
Clerk of the Courts. The submission of a CFJ constitutes proof
of the existence of such a dispute.
A CFJ should be a single clearly-labeled Statement whose truth
or falsity can be determined using logical reasoning, assuming
perfect knowledge. A CFJ may be accompanied by Arguments,
Evidence, or other related material; the Judge is encouraged,
but not required, to take notice of these things.
Amended(9) by P5015 'CFJ by announcement' (Zefram), 24 Jun 2007 Changed the longstanding “submit to the CotC” method to by announcement.
Retitled by P5086 'judicial reform' (Zefram), 01 Aug 2007 Amended(10) by P5086 'judicial reform' (Zefram), 01 Aug 2007 Proposal 5086 was a major change in definitions that created “inquiry cases” (the traditional kind) and “equity cases” and removed the general CFJ definition. The proposal (resolved here: https://mailman.agoranomic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/agora- official/2007-August/003161.html) had a specific and detailed continuity method, including the following text: * Each pre-reform CFJ continues to exist as a post-reform inquiry case. * Each pre-reform CFJ with a judge assigned has the same judge assigned in its post-reform form. * Each pre-reform CFJ with no judge assigned has no judge assigned in its post-reform form.
My reading of these clauses is that they successfully transitioned pre- reform “CFJs” to post-reform “inquiry cases” without loss of continuity.
Amended(11) by P5110 'Regulate ID numbers' (Murphy), 02 Aug 2007 Made ID numbers more official - no effect on continuity.
Amended(12) by P5317 'Judicial fixes' (Murphy), 28 Nov 2007 Clarified the hierarchy of types of judgements by making this the first paragraph of R991: A judicial case, also known as a call for judgement (CFJ), is a procedure to settle a matter of controversy. There are subclasses of judicial case with particular features defined by other rules. Subclasses of judicial case exist only as defined by the rules. The “inquiry” subclass remained continuous with the past.
Amended(13) by P5464 'Secure more judicial aspects' (Murphy), 13 Mar 2008 Assigned to the Committee on the Judiciary by P6053 'Committees' (Murphy, woggle, ais523), 23 Jan 2009 Amended(14) by P7050 'No more warp drive' (omd), 16 May 2011
None of these affected basic definitions or continuity.
Retitled by P7616 'Mostly Simple Judging v2.3' (G.), 16 Jan 2014 Amended(15) by P7616 'Mostly Simple Judging v2.3' (G.), 16 Jan 2014 Vastly simplified the Judicial system. Converged the different types of cases (while being explicit about synonyms for continuity). Resulting Rule: Any person (the initiator) can initiate a Call for Judgement (CFJ, syn. Judicial Case) by announcement, specifying a statement to be inquired into. E may optionally bar one person from the case.
At any time, each CFJ is either open (default), or has exactly one
judgement.
When a CFJ has no judge assigned, the Speaker CAN assign any
player to be its judge by announcement, and SHALL do so within a
week. The players eligible to be assigned as judge are all
players except the initiator and the person barred (if any). The
Speaker SHALL assign judges over time such that all interested
players have reasonably equal opportunities to judge.
Amended(16) by P7629 'Do Things' (Alexis), 07 Apr 2014 Created the Arbitor office.
Amended(17) by P7647 'formatting/misc fixes' (omd), 03 Jun 2014
Amended(18) by P7777 'Simplified moot fix' (omd), 14 Aug 2015
Amended(19) by P7803 'Self-service judiciary' (G.), 31 Jul 2016
Amended(20) by P7867 'Economics Overhaul v2' (nch, o, grok, Aris), 30 Jul 2017
Amended(21) by P7876 'Float On' (o), 26 Sep 2017
Amended(22) by P7888 'BILLY MAYS HERE' (o, R. Lee), 26 Sep 2017
Amended(23) by P7899 'Arbitor's Union' (G.), 03 Oct 2017
Amended(24) by P8004 'Rusty' (G.), 30 Jan 2018
Amended(25) by P8005 'Hopefully routine fixes' (Murphy), 06 Feb 2018
Amended(26) by P8014 'Putting Agora on a Map v7' (Trigon, Aris, ATMunn, G., o, R. Lee), 24 Feb 2018
Amended(27) by P8017 'RTRW Cleanups' (Alexis), 06 Mar 2018
Amended(28) by P8065 'No undead courts' (twg), 18 Jul 2018
Amended(29) by cleaning (Trigon), 31 Oct 2018 All of Amendments 17-29 were minor (or side-things like adding and removing economics) that didn’t affect continuity and without any side- effects from Proposals.
Amended(30) by P8134 'The judge switch' (G.), 02 Dec 2018 Turned Judge into a CFJ switch. Importantly, the proposal included a continuity clause: For every CFJ that was assigned to a judge immediately before this proposal took effect, that CFJ's judge switch is flipped to that judge.
Amended(31) by P8221 'Usage de-capitalization' (Jason Cobb, Aris), 05 Sep 2019 Decapitalized all the stuff.
I hope this thorough review is sufficient evidence to prove the truth of the statement of CFJ 3822 - that CFJ 7 has existed continuously as a CFJ (on occasion called an inquiry case), is very likely (to the preponderance of evidence) existing, open, that it either had no judge or the judge was successfully recused by Arbitor G., and as such, CFJ 7 has recently been assigned to Jason.
CONCLUSIONS
The above arguments (to question 2) were found TRUE by Judge Aris in CFJ 3822, and CFJ 7 was resolved by Judge Jason (using the TRUE/FALSE options that were consistent under Question 1). Judge Aris pointed out that, technically, DISMISS might be appropriate given that we could never be sure that ancient judgements weren't explicitly "ratified away" or otherwise broken by a hidden proposal or other game actiion. However, Judge Aris sides with the historical record (thus extending a bit of precedent on standard of proof for historical documents):
Given all of the emphasis we've placed on preserving our history, judging this case DISMISS merely because of the slight chance that there was some change that was missed would be an admission of defeat. It would be an admission that despite the efforts we've taken to preserve our records of the past, we could nevertheless not trust them. This is not how we play Agora. We play on the assumption that the records of the past are true, unless there is some special reason to doubt their validity. If we cannot find any intermediate evidence invalidating past evidence about the state of the game, and there is no particular reason to expect that changes have happened in the meantime, we will continue on the assumption that the state of affairs remains the same until it is proven wrong, thus preserving the chain of time linking us to our past.
Thus, as per the findings of the current legal system, the Agoran system for resolving disputes (the Call for Judgement on the truth value of a particular statement) has a legal consistency, and thus represents a formal stare decisis, that stretches (at the time of this writing) for nearly 27 years.