As you can see, I have decided to accept a nomination for Justice. While this may seem outside my element, it wouldn’t be my first time serving in this type of role. A few years back, I served as the Chief Justice in TVF (the only justice in the region), and had the chance to write several court opinions. I also know my way around the executive and legislative branches, as an author of legislation, the guy who manages it, and the guy who executes it. As part of the Security Council, I have experience in a small collaborative group whose work is more often than not reliant on that cooperation and where we can’t always just do everything on our own. I don’t have any other roles in the region that require my primary focus, and as usual I have the time. In fact, that’s a big part of why I decided to go for this. I have watched with the same frustration many of you have had as the court drags its feet and makes some of the simplest cases take forever. Even worse, some of those cases have been botched by the court itself, without even taking into consideration the missteps of the advocates. I have lent my voice to the critics of the judicial branch of this region’s government. Some of you may have even heard me question the very existence of this court. But like so many of you, I struggle to imagine what would take its place. TNP has a long and checkered history with its judiciary, but there’s a lot to be proud of, and a lot that has worked rather well. I believe that with dedicated and honest effort, we can make the court work better. I have some time to give that effort more of my attention, so I figured I might as well put myself forward.
I do not think it is controversial to say that things need to change with our court. We need to take a serious look at what it is doing and whether or not it is actually working. People have long laughed at what the court has done, and its reputation precedes it. I would like to try my hand at serving on the court with reform in mind. As far as I’m concerned, everything is on the table, from court procedure to the way it writes opinions. I hope that my time on the court can inform me, and eventually you, as to where we need legislative changes (if we conclude we do) for how to improve our court system and judicial process in general. I hope that in offering myself up for this role I can do more than the basics, and we can finally begin to take seriously a way to improve the court. I would welcome the RA’s input and anyone who has an idea to change or improve the judicial process in TNP, and I would be a partner and advocate from the court.
I know this is fairly unorthodox for a court campaign. I know it’s unorthodox for me personally as a candidate. These days I find myself not wanting to mince words, and just seeing where that goes. I will gladly take questions and the legal quizzes many of you are fond of. I hope that you have room on your ballot for an unusual candidate and campaign like mine.
This really isn’t the typical campaign I would run. It’s certainly not the typical court campaign. But I don’t think that’s what we need right now. There are those people available to run in this election, and I think it wouldn’t hurt to have them on the court, but that’s not what I want to offer you now. That said, I don’t sign up to do jobs I don’t intend to do to the best of my ability, or with complete seriousness. I’m not running just to give people someone to vote for, I’m not pursuing the office just to see what it’s like. Putting me on the court means that I will try to make the court work better, that I will see where I can make changes, starting with the areas where I think it has performed worst lately. That would be how quickly cases are heard and opinions are drafted, and how careful the justices are in rendering those opinions and managing the trials. One justice hears a case, but collaboration is a key part of the job. I can only guess what it’s like behind the closed doors of the court, but I can promise that I will do my part to limit delays and do my part to spur the other justices to act, whenever I can. To the extent my input can help prevent a justice from going awry, and making a mistake in executing their duties, I hope I can be there to course correct so some of the foreseeable errors never happen. But because we don’t know what that dynamic looks like, I can’t promise I will be a taskmaster or crack a whip, or that these delays are even completely unreasonable. No one knows what it’s like in the justices’s chambers (except current and former justices), and I can’t promise that I can change that once I’m on the other side, but I think there are ways to improve communication from the court, primarily by utilizing the court’s threads more often. I started a trend in having weekly reports in the Vice Delegate’s thread when I held that office, and I think we should do something similar with the court, to the extent we can share specifics (or at worst, generalities about what we’re working on).
I believe that we can make this existing court work if the people on it stop being purely reactive and work on reform when they aren’t working on a case. The court has been traditionally reactive, because functionally it has to be, but the justices can and should be concerned with how it can evolve and advance its way of doing things, and the insight into how it works would be valuable in crafting potential legislation to work on improving the judiciary. I want to offer my experience and my skillset to try to work on the court from within, while of course also being reliable for all the basic functions a justice needs to be able to perform: writing opinions, following existing court traditions and guidelines, the current procedures, running a trial. At the very least, I can do the job the way people understand it, the way it is typically done. But hopefully, we can revisit and re-evaluate all of that stuff. I think it’s overdue. And I don’t see any other candidates who seem to want to reckon with that (that is, when we have candidates at all as they seem to be on the decline these days).
I think the best illustration of what I mean is a recent court case that amused and generated facepalms for everyone who paid attention to it. One thing that I hope never happens again, and that I would consider it my duty to avoid, is for advocates to lose a case on a technicality that anyone paying proper attention in the trial would have been able to observe. If we want justice to actually be served, then we should be concerned with the facts of the case and the arguments, not whether all the prerequisite court-cosplay was done correctly. If I see basic procedure is not being followed, I will insist that it is so that such things don’t undermine and render the entire process pointless by dominating the conclusion of the trial. These things should be addressed and fixed as they come up and so that we don’t play another round of TNP Gotcha where we try to figure out how to end a case without ever addressing the original problem that caused the case in the first place. If we can avoid that by simplifying and eliminating some of that stuff so it’s never an issue again, even better. Procedure should facilitate good management of a case and afford opportunities for both sides of a case to have their case heard properly and fairly, it shouldn’t be so complex that we forget pieces of it or get tangled in it to the point we lose sight of what we’re really doing there. Again, I don’t know how extensive such changes would be, and I admit it’s possible I will discover once there that we have to maintain what we have to keep the court as currently constituted on track. If that’s what I determine, then all I can say is that I will do my best to make following those procedures as painless as possible, paying close attention and maintaining a good speed in handling the case.
I honestly believe that these problems stem from casual players finding it difficult to play pretend court. TNP had a lot of big legal minds back in the day and they had a lot of fun with this part of the government. I’m less inclined to think that about our current crop of players. We need a justice system that is less concerned with all of that pomp and circumstance, and that remembers this is not just a virtual court in a political simulation game, but also the only avenue for adjudicating disputes related to our region’s politics and rules, and the only way to properly resolve them. That’s my judicial philosophy, and I hope to extend it to how I would write opinions, that is, relatively straightforward, with as little artifice as possible. I hope that when I write an opinion, it will be obvious and clear what the result is and why, preferably within a few lines of reading it.
I believe that we can make this existing court work if the people on it stop being purely reactive and work on reform when they aren’t working on a case. The court has been traditionally reactive, because functionally it has to be, but the justices can and should be concerned with how it can evolve and advance its way of doing things, and the insight into how it works would be valuable in crafting potential legislation to work on improving the judiciary. I want to offer my experience and my skillset to try to work on the court from within, while of course also being reliable for all the basic functions a justice needs to be able to perform: writing opinions, following existing court traditions and guidelines, the current procedures, running a trial. At the very least, I can do the job the way people understand it, the way it is typically done. But hopefully, we can revisit and re-evaluate all of that stuff. I think it’s overdue. And I don’t see any other candidates who seem to want to reckon with that (that is, when we have candidates at all as they seem to be on the decline these days).
I think the best illustration of what I mean is a recent court case that amused and generated facepalms for everyone who paid attention to it. One thing that I hope never happens again, and that I would consider it my duty to avoid, is for advocates to lose a case on a technicality that anyone paying proper attention in the trial would have been able to observe. If we want justice to actually be served, then we should be concerned with the facts of the case and the arguments, not whether all the prerequisite court-cosplay was done correctly. If I see basic procedure is not being followed, I will insist that it is so that such things don’t undermine and render the entire process pointless by dominating the conclusion of the trial. These things should be addressed and fixed as they come up and so that we don’t play another round of TNP Gotcha where we try to figure out how to end a case without ever addressing the original problem that caused the case in the first place. If we can avoid that by simplifying and eliminating some of that stuff so it’s never an issue again, even better. Procedure should facilitate good management of a case and afford opportunities for both sides of a case to have their case heard properly and fairly, it shouldn’t be so complex that we forget pieces of it or get tangled in it to the point we lose sight of what we’re really doing there. Again, I don’t know how extensive such changes would be, and I admit it’s possible I will discover once there that we have to maintain what we have to keep the court as currently constituted on track. If that’s what I determine, then all I can say is that I will do my best to make following those procedures as painless as possible, paying close attention and maintaining a good speed in handling the case.
I honestly believe that these problems stem from casual players finding it difficult to play pretend court. TNP had a lot of big legal minds back in the day and they had a lot of fun with this part of the government. I’m less inclined to think that about our current crop of players. We need a justice system that is less concerned with all of that pomp and circumstance, and that remembers this is not just a virtual court in a political simulation game, but also the only avenue for adjudicating disputes related to our region’s politics and rules, and the only way to properly resolve them. That’s my judicial philosophy, and I hope to extend it to how I would write opinions, that is, relatively straightforward, with as little artifice as possible. I hope that when I write an opinion, it will be obvious and clear what the result is and why, preferably within a few lines of reading it.
I do not think it is controversial to say that things need to change with our court. We need to take a serious look at what it is doing and whether or not it is actually working. People have long laughed at what the court has done, and its reputation precedes it. I would like to try my hand at serving on the court with reform in mind. As far as I’m concerned, everything is on the table, from court procedure to the way it writes opinions. I hope that my time on the court can inform me, and eventually you, as to where we need legislative changes (if we conclude we do) for how to improve our court system and judicial process in general. I hope that in offering myself up for this role I can do more than the basics, and we can finally begin to take seriously a way to improve the court. I would welcome the RA’s input and anyone who has an idea to change or improve the judicial process in TNP, and I would be a partner and advocate from the court.
I know this is fairly unorthodox for a court campaign. I know it’s unorthodox for me personally as a candidate. These days I find myself not wanting to mince words, and just seeing where that goes. I will gladly take questions and the legal quizzes many of you are fond of. I hope that you have room on your ballot for an unusual candidate and campaign like mine.
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