Why a thriving micronation needs credible adjudicators

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Jamie Palisades
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Why a thriving micronation needs credible adjudicators

Post by Jamie Palisades »

Heer's the analogy: Professional investors in other RL nations routinely measure "country risk", asking questions like: does the local government keep its promises. Confiscate private assets? Give out the goodies only to its friends? And (important) does it have stable laws and fair judges?

It matters. This was a HUGE change in the 1980s in China, where the government enacted commercial laws, arbitral panels, and two "special economic zones" with simplified rules and different easier courts ... and sent their judges to law school : ) Really. The relevant rating agencies and foreign ministries upped their ratings of the safety of investing in PRC business. Commercial outside investment in China increased radically ... and has never ceased.

In SL, let's say you are starting a big new venture. Maybe a store like the old CN Emporio Romani, but not necessarily ... maybe a big art gallery .. maybe a big environmental NGO installation. How SAFE would you feel about plunking down a big land and building investment, and human-training time, on CDS land? Is it a meritocracy? Or do "all the goodies" only go to people with the right group of friends? Is the government mostly about building and fostering creativity? Or mostly about politicians chasing titles and attacking each other, ignoring the needs of the sim and the outside world?

And can you get "a fair shake"? How much risk do you have that the Supreme High Justice Whatever is reasonably impartial, and not the cousin, or alt, of the guy you're having the dispute with?

This is not about money. It's about being attractive to any kind of project. For example, Carl Metropolitan's NCI group made a big bet on Desmond's Caledon, setting up a big non-commercial newbie educational project there. Cool stuff. Because they were pretty sure that Despot Des was going to be around for a while ... an asset to them.. and well managed, not an erratic mudwrestling contest.

I believe that CDS will continue to look for affiliations, commercial and creative opportunities, whoever is running it. If we land a big one ... and CDS decides that we do want to do it ... what will that project's leaders think of us? Would they feel good about making that kind of bet on CDS? What do we need to do, to make sure that answer is yes?

I've had a while to think about it. Part of my answer is, make the SC credible. A name change would be a good idea too, but the most serious issue is that it's moribund.

Regards Jamie

== My Second Life home is CDS. Retired after three terms
== as chancellor of the oldest self-governing sims in SL.
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Patroklus Murakami
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Re: Why a thriving micronation needs credible adjudicators

Post by Patroklus Murakami »

I'm not sure the analogy Jamie is making holds up. Caledon doesn't have 'stable laws and fair judges', it has a credible and consistent (benign) despot. We have a long-running, relatively stable project. The Constitution says that one of the roles (note, only one of them) of the Scientific Council is "to resolve citizen disputes". It has rarely been called on to do so and I think we ought to discuss whether we want the SC to carry out this role. An alternative might be to delete this part of the Constitution and allow the SC to focus on what it does best - defending the Constitution.

I recall that Ashcroft made many similar arguments about the benefits of a CDS legal system in support of the judiciary he designed and which was later dismantled. I'm not really convinced that it's needed. It might help to set out what kind of disputes we would expect the SC (or judiciary) to adjudicate on. That would highlight whether this was really a task for the CDS or for Linden Labs or a real world court for example.

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Cindy Ecksol
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Re: Why a thriving micronation needs credible adjudicators

Post by Cindy Ecksol »

Patroklus Murakami wrote:

I'm not sure the analogy Jamie is making holds up. Caledon doesn't have 'stable laws and fair judges', it has a credible and consistent (benign) despot. We have a long-running, relatively stable project. The Constitution says that one of the roles (note, only one of them) of the Scientific Council is "to resolve citizen disputes". It has rarely been called on to do so and I think we ought to discuss whether we want the SC to carry out this role. An alternative might be to delete this part of the Constitution and allow the SC to focus on what it does best - defending the Constitution.

I recall that Ashcroft made many similar arguments about the benefits of a CDS legal system in support of the judiciary he designed and which was later dismantled. I'm not really convinced that it's needed. It might help to set out what kind of disputes we would expect the SC (or judiciary) to adjudicate on. That would highlight whether this was really a task for the CDS or for Linden Labs or a real world court for example.

This IS kind of an interesting question. Up to this point, the SC has been a creature of CDS, resolving only CDS disputes, and really only resolving those that claim a Constitutional violation. I'll note that if we're talking about disputes inside of CDS, it really wouldn't be difficult to tie just about any dispute to some provision of the Constitution: we've seen that done a number of times just in the last year or so. But I consider that kind of thing just practice for what Jamie's talking about: the unrealized potential for a body like SC to provide a more organized dispute-resolution process for SL at large.

The Constitution DOES envision SC as a body to which all kinds of SL disputes might come. We haven't done any of that yet, but given that it's in the Constitution, I'd like to see us explore exactly what it might take to be able to market an "alternative dispute resolution service" to the rest of SL. Not a court the way Ash envisioned, but something both more informal and potentially more powerful. If we do it right, we might find that we begin attracting a whole new set of skills here and create a core economy that takes advantage of those skills. Definitely worth a look...

Cindy

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