Cormac said:
Are you comfortable with Mandate 12 (Article V, Section 3) requiring that the Court's procedures be defined by law, or do you think that should be amended? If the latter, how do you think the Court's procedures should be defined?
I'm not generally thrilled with it, honestly. In general I think defining procedures in the law is problematic - the law is generally pretty inflexible and it's extremely hard to account for needed variations. For example, people often want to write in strict deadlines. "The court will issue a ruling within five days", or something like that. But in actual practice... one justice has a RL emergency and is too busy dealing with that to take point on a question. The other two live in opposite time zones and can't find a convenient time to get online together and hash things out, so the discussion takes days to get anywhere conclusive. Then there's writing the ruling, and touching on all the points that need to be touched on, and vetting it to make sure it doesn't conflict with other things, and proofreading to make sure you didn't miss a critical "not". So now you're on, say, day six... and now you're in violation of the
law, not just an internal procedure.
I think the members of the court have a better view of how well procedures are or are not working, or what restrictions are reasonable or unreasonable to impose. They're also able to move more quickly to amend a problematic section of the law, simply by talking about it and taking a quick three-person vote, versus the Assembly which has to have a proper discussion period and voting period (and could very well vote *against* what all three justices want, forcing them to continue to use something they think is bad).
So yes, my preference would be to amend that section. I don't mind the Assembly having
some say in things - for example, I think it would be reasonable for the Assembly to specify whether
anyone can bring a legal question, or just citizens, or just government officials, etc. Or, it would be reasonable for it to mandate that there be
some period of time where people can submit
amicus briefs before the justices rule. But the specifics are just too fiddly to make sense as law.
On a related note, do any of the three of you plan to put forward Court procedures to be defined by law? Not that I think you necessarily should (or shouldn't), I'm just wondering because so far we haven't seen any movement from anyone to do that.
Well... maybe. My first intention is to talk all of this over with my fellow justices to decide on a plan - if both of them think that assembly-defined procedures are better than court-defined, I'm not gonna force the issue by bringing an amendment, and will jump straight to drafting something for the Assembly. But if they agree with me that it's better to have them written by the Court, I plan on proposing a Mandate amendment instead.
Do you think the Court should have jurisdiction over criminal matters or are you comfortable with the process established by Article II, Section 6 of Mandate 12?
It's a smidge more complicated than that, I just wanted an excuse to use that clip.
In general I have no particular attachment to a criminal court. I'm very willing to try out alternate dispute resolution systems, including mediation, inquisition, and such. And if there is a criminal process, I'm also not averse to it being handled by a separate group of people than those that handle constitutional questions.
But... the current process doesn't thrill me. It seems too open for abuse. A delegate could, with the consent of a majority of the CLS, make a political move (such as revoking the citizenship anybody also a citizen in any other GCR), and rely on the remaining members of the Assembly to not have enough opposition to muster up a 75% override. As I recall, this is something like what Feux did way back when.
I would be more comfortable (though still not completely comfortable; at heart executive power unnerves me) with it if it required a majority vote by both the CLS and the Assembly to confirm such a revocation. Alternatively, I could go for adding the right for anybody whose citizenship was stripped in this way to appeal to the court, which could overturn the decision if it found there was no evidence of a security threat.
The other thing is, I don't think "taking away their citizenship and banning them from the region" suffices to cover all reasonable punishments for various crimes, and I also don't think that all crimes threaten the "security and stability" of Lazarus. Treason and espionage? Sure. But lying about having citizenship in another region, or misusing your power as a government official, or other smaller things don't quite meet that same bar. If the Assembly Speaker deliberately discounts valid votes to sway the results, they should lose their office, but probably don't need to be outright banned.
I'll also caveat this with saying that I generally have an opposition to making the body responsible for regional security also the body responsible for carrying out or approving justice. A court, in general, has the goal of interpreting the law and ensuring it is upheld, and furthering the course of justice as best they can. But the security apparatus can be prone to paranoia or excessive concern, out of the desire to protect the region, and are not tasked with ensuring that decisions are
just or
right. I think the security apparatus is more prone to violating peoples' rights and violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the governing document than the court is. And I think we can see an example of this in TSP, with their CRS taking some decidedly undemocratic steps to remove or exclude people in a way that is or can easily be politicized.
The court, ideally, exists in opposition to these impulses. It stops the will of the powerful from simply holding sway in all cases. I am wary about this role being assigned to another body.
