I cast my vote in the following way:

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Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN on January 13, 2021, 01:17:47 AM

Quote from: Sir Alexandreu Davinescu on January 12, 2021, 10:35:24 PM
I don't think it's feasible to really fairly design any process that can act on the basis of another country's accusations: only convictions should be an acceptable basis for review by our courts.

I can understand the logic of this position, though I'm not 100% convinced. Is there no act outside Talossa that a Talossan could do which would be, not illegal, but (a) repugnant to the Covenants, and (b) brings Talossa into disrepute, and that we might want to impose sanctions on? We couldn't decide to censure a Talossan who - oh, let's say - spread legal but repulsive hate speech outside Talossa?

I'm sure there are all sorts of things that fall into those categories, either justly or unjustly! But that's the danger, isn't it? We can't punish people without due process, including a trial. Plus, the covenants are mostly guarantees against the power of the government, not specific crimes or even principles around which you could construct the basis for a criminal charge. If I told my daughter that she couldn't get an abortion, I couldn't be prosecuted for that, I don't think. Instead, it would just be a mechanism by which she could sue to get an abortion anyway, without my consent.

It might be possible to come up with a process that will ensure due process while also allowing for the prosecution of things that aren't crimes under our laws but which we don't like, but I can't even begin to imagine such a thing.

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN on January 12, 2021, 04:59:51 PM
PETTY THEFT: violation of the Fourth Covenant right to property. Should be liable for a misdemeanour charge, only if the Cort is satisfied that it's of the kind that brings Talossa into disrepute.

EMBEZZLEMENT: felony violation of the Fourth Covenant and brings Talossa into disrepute. More chance of a conviction and a serious punishment.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: felony violation of the Sixth Covenant and brings Talossa into disrepute. More chance of a conviction and a serious punishment.

ACCUSATION OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: Let's specify that conviction by a macronational court should be only considered prima facie evidence of bad behaviour; a State prosecutor (or the Cort) could look at the sentencing authority and go "kangaroo court under a dictatorship, not touching that". Or, alternatively, if someone gets off a rape/spousal abuse case because of a misogynist judge or jury, the Court would still be enabled to use the "balance of probabilities based on the evidence" test. The "bringing Talossa into disrepute" test would also come into action, for example, if it were a famous trial and a lot of people saw a rapist getting off because the courts are misogynist.

Here's where the rubber hits the road, though, doesn't it?  Under this proposal, the scope of Talossan prosecution seems as though it would -- in your view -- encompass all potential convictions or accusations or even exonerations, serious or no, as a basis for potential prosecution.  So if we were to end up someplace in this neighborhood -- which I'm not opposing -- there would need to be a whole trial and things really get messy.  If we're trying someone on the basis of an accusation of spousal abuse, for example, the Talossan in question would have due process rights that a Talossan court probably couldn't exercise in any real way.

Because of those things, I'd suggest the most practical way forward is to view and treat the matter as a question of accepting another country's judicial proceedings as acceptable in the eyes of our own Organic requirements.  In other words, I don't think it's feasible to really fairly design any process that can act on the basis of another country's accusations: only convictions should be an acceptable basis for review by our courts.

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN on January 12, 2021, 02:12:46 PM
Let's focus on the point here. What shall we replace El Lex A:1-4 with?

- a full replacement Talossan legal code? Far too much work.
- would the Regent's special prosecutor system work fully to replace these sections? And how? Can we have a hypothetical example, eg: what would a "special prosecutor" have done in the I. Canún case?
- do we need extra "principles" to guide the Courts in these "special prosecutor" cases outwith those currently in the Covenants?

There is a much broader question I've raised of whether our current "quasi common law system" is adequate for our purposes - and indeed what is the statutory basis for it since the reference to Anglo-American principles was taken out of the OrgLaw. (Are we to assume that Talossa inherited the common law on 26/12/79?) The alternative would be to resort to Civil Law, i.e. precedent no longer has value and where there's no statute the Court can't rule.

I agree, the discussion should stay focused on the actual question at hand about how and if we incorporate other countries legalities into our own.

I will pose a couple of hypotheticals to assist.

A. A person is convicted of a minor crime like petty theft in their local jurisdiction, but is also widely disliked by people in power. Who and how do we decide whether or not to apply consequences here, by whatever mechanism the Ziu designs?

B. A person is convicted of a very serious crime like large-scale embezzlement, but not a crime that is immediately inflammatory to a lot of folks. Do they suffer consequences here?

C. A person is convicted of a very serious crime that is abhorrent to everyone, like spousal abuse. Do they suffer consequences here?

D. A person is accused of a very serious crime that is abbhorent to everyone, like spousal abuse. Do they suffer consequences here?

E. A person is convicted of a crime that is controversially illegal in some places but not others, such as obtaining an abortion. Who and how do we decide whether or not they suffer consequences here?

Any reform made by the Ziu must be able to handle each of these situations without endangering the liberties of our people.

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN on January 12, 2021, 01:43:01 PM
All right, time for some archeology. Wisconsin law was written into our law (at the proposal of KR1) by 31RZ14, which reads in part:

QuoteWHEREAS under Talossan law, there are no actual, legal prohibitions against murder, rape, robbery, or any other crimes...

So clearly KR1 was thinking of the kind of crimes of gross moral turpitude that I. Canún is currently doing time for. This was further amended (at Sir Cresti's proposal) by 35RZ21. The list of those sections of the Wisconsin Code "dynamically included" in our law are:

QuoteChapters 240-243 Fraudulent Conveyances and Contracts
    Chapters 401-411 Uniform Commercial Code
    Chapters 421-429 Wisconsin Consumer Act
    Chapters 700-710 Property
    Chapters 938-951 Criminal Code
    Chapter 961 Controlled Substances

I suppose we could go through Old Witt's debates to find out exactly why Sir Cresti thought these sections should apply to Talossa. But I maintain the following:

• putting Wisconsin law into Talossan law means that Talossan judges and lawyers have to be familiar with Wisconsin case and statute law to really know our law, which is ridiculous and puts the Talossan law out of reach for any but US-trained lawyers (like Cresti, lol)
• no case of "murder, rape or robbery" has ever been tried under these law in Talossan court
• I believe that the only time these sections were invoked was when Cresti relied on Wisconsin court decisions as precedent in Talossan court - see above

These sections need to be repealed. Talossan law should be indigenous. But what will they be replaced with? That's what we're discussing.

A point I've made which seems to have been ignored is that Talossa's current common law system already allows courts a lot of discretion to hear cases on matters not referred to by statute. So if we adopted a set of "Principles of the Common Law of Talossa", Courts could base their decisions on those rather than on the "Anglo-American" precedent enshrined by the previous OrgLaw. But if the idea of judges ruling on matters not specifically referred to by statute is a problem, then we should switch to a Civil Law code post haste, which removes judicial discretion over matters not in statute. The Regent seems upset by something which is the status quo.

I'm not upset, but I also would note that you are mistaken about a few things. Multiple times, people have been charged or nearly charged with crimes under those legal codes. It hasn't happened a lot, but it has happened. It just isn't very equitable.

Yes, the modern court system has been bent inexorably towards the court system with which most of the judges in office have been familiar. It's not quite as open-season as you think, though!

Are the citizenry in general really not allowed to reply to discussions here?  For goodness sake, change that so people like the justices can participate!

V says:

Quote from: Viteu on January 12, 2021, 09:38:32 AM
My apologies to the Ziu, I realized after the fact that the Committee of Legal Reforms thread is in the Lobby and not in Wittenberg.   I posted based on the "new posts" feed.  Having realized my mistake, the post has been removed.  But I do think there is a conversation that should be open to Talossa-at-large.  So I'm reproducing my commentary here.  The original thread can be found here. 
______


I want to chime in regarding the alcohol analogy.  Although there is a shared minimum alcohol consumption/purchasing age of 21 among the States, it is not the same law across the Country.  In Wisconsin, someone under the age of 21 can certainly be served an alcoholic beverage in a public establishment by their parent or guardian, while in North Carolina they cannot.  Even assuming Wisconsin did have an outright ban on underage alcohol consumption, it only applies to committing the offense if present in Wisconsin, an 18-year-old who consumes alcohol in Cezembre would not have broken a Wisconsin law because they did not consume alcohol in Wisconsin.  By way of example, my first trip to Europe at age 20, I purchased and consumed a beer in Schwedenplatz (public place) in Vienna.  Did I break New York law? No. New York has a similar law to Wisconsin, but even so, I purchased and consumed alcohol publicly in another country where the conduct was permissible. So I did not have to worry about facing criminal charges when I returned home.

The US, federal and State, rarely imposes criminal liability for conduct that occurs outside of a jurisdiction.  Where it does, it's very limited circumstance--think sex tourism.  So this is not the best analogy.

Regarding the merit of the Regent's thoughts, I generally find them agreeable.  I see the value is removing Wisconsin law from our criminal law, but we cannot possibly address every instance of criminal conduct that may present itself given our resources and needs.  I like the idea of a carefully regulated special counsel, but I would add that a tenant of criminal law is that a person must be able to know what they're doing is illegal.  There must be a benchmark.  Also, Talossa is unique in that we're seeking to hold someone criminally liable for conduct outside of Talossa for general crime.  I'd say further narrowing--only those crimes of such magnitude as to impact the wellness and health of Talossa, should be permissible for consideration of judicial incorporation (I'm thinking of murder or statutory rape as opposed to a speeding ticket).

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN on January 11, 2021, 08:26:48 PM
So: some principles rooted in both Talossan tradition, universal human ethics, and "common sense" that would enable judges to rule effectively in cases where Talossan statute law is silent, and replacing the "importing" of Wisconsin law. In addition to the current Covenant of Rights and Freedoms, of course. What do we think?

I want to be clear that we should be unbelievably careful about this, and we should make sure we set up such a system to strictly limit judicial power.  I'd suggest such a system involve a special counsel to do fact-finding, then some sort of adversarial process.  It's hard to emphasize just how open to abuse this system could be, if it became a backdoor for imposing ad-hoc consequences for ad-hoc crimes.  I hesitate to even suggest such a big change, since I'm generally inclined to conservatism about such things, but I've thought about this point for years, and our current system falls short in terms of equity.

Quote from: Eðo Grischun on January 12, 2021, 08:19:26 AM
Maybe we should be deciding what bits of law Talossa actually needs to concern itself with and instead of using Wisconsin as the catch-all for everything else, have a clause stating that everything else is dependant on the resident State/country of the citizen.  ?

This has been suggested, but it poses serious problems:

Quote from: Sir Alexandreu Davinescu on January 11, 2021, 06:48:31 PM
cooler heads prevailed and pointed out that not everyone in our country lives in a place with a fair justice system.

It's illegal for women to sign contracts in Saudia Arabia unless countersigned by a male guardian, for example.  We wouldn't want anyone able to impose Talossan consequences at will for the same crime.  We can't incorporate every country's legal principles or laws into our own dynamically at all without some form of review, I think.

Quote from: Ián Tamorán S.H. on January 12, 2021, 09:06:07 AM
As far as I know - and. of course, things may have changed since I last looked - Talossan Law refers back to Wisconsin law only in a very few places, and is NOT (in general) dependant upon that law.

For many years, Wisconsin criminal and civil codes have been incorporated into our law.  It's actually been the first provision of el Lexhatx for its entire existence: http://wiki.talossa.com/Law:El_Lexhatx#A._General_Crime  That's what prompts this specific discussion.

MZs:

Obviously I have a lot of sympathy to this idea of removing the Wisconsin provisions from our law. The main impediment has been a purely practical one. For a long time now, we have trying to operate under the knowledge that we lack the resources to investigate and involuntarily punish (in most ways) criminals outside of our usual scope, but with the desire to have the ability to act to preserve the nature of our community. If we discover that a citizen has been convicted of some sort of serious crime in their other jurisdiction, then the general idea has been to preserve some freedom to act on that knowledge. It hasn't really worked out this way, though, and in practice we mostly ignore that part of the law.

I would love to see you guys come up with a solution that preserves our ability to maintain our garden walls, yet which is also more realistic. One thought had been, after the Iusti incident (when a citizen was sent to jail in the US for horrible crimes) to adopt extratalossan verdicts dynamically. In other words, if you're convicted of something in your other jurisdiction, we consider you convicted here and assess appropriate penalties. But cooler heads prevailed and pointed out that not everyone in our country lives in a place with a fair justice system.

I think it would be foolish to try to write our own whole legal code. It would end up being unfair or incomplete, and would also spawn a huge number of arguments over things that don't actually trend to divide us in practical terms, like access to abortion.

My suggestion would instead be to eliminate the Wisconsin provisions from our statutes, but also -- very carefully! -- create a review process where our courts can appoint a special counsel to investigate convictions in other jurisdictions, and where the court then issues ruling based on carefully specified principles that incorporates the special counsel's findings.

My two bence.

I was hoping to have a conversation about the bill rather than just an identical revote.  It is unchanged from the version that the Crown was forced to veto.

Quote from: Sir Alexandreu Davinescu on December 31, 2020, 01:49:55 PM
So as I read this, the general idea is that only members of the legislature should be allowed to introduce legislation, and the impetus is based on a general principle along those lines? Is that something you feel strongly about?

Really glad to hear we're moving away from dependency on one person.  It also sounds like that won't be the case in the future.  Thanks for your hard work!

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN on January 10, 2021, 02:35:34 PM
I reached out to the Chancery over the last week on the following issues:

1) questioning when the referendum would start, since it had to be during this Clark.
2) the aforementioned discussion of 50 word statements.
3) in the last few hours I offered my opinion that Sir Pol and the Regent were right and 1-option ballots were perfectly legal, and thus the ballots should be resent.

That's it.

Thank you very much for this clear and complete response to my question.

Quote from: Dr. Txec Róibeard dal Nordselvă, Esq., O.SPM, SMM on January 10, 2021, 02:12:52 PM

Quote from: Sir Alexandreu Davinescu on January 10, 2021, 01:53:44 PM

Quote from: Dr. Txec Róibeard dal Nordselvă, Esq., O.SPM, SMM on January 10, 2021, 01:44:55 PM
For heavens sake. The ONLY person running this election is myself, with the help of my duly appointed deputy MPF. The Seneschal reminded me of it. She has no access to anything else. Hell, even I don't have full access to the database and I am the Secretary of State. We should move on.

The principle involved is pretty important, right?

Honestly, I think that this should have just been another pretty minor, "Whoops, you're right, another little mistake" moment.  But the Seneschal's desire to defend it makes me worried that we're setting a bad precedent where the Seneschal does help run elections in the future.

So just to be clear (you know what a constitutional worrywart I am): the exchange above was the sum of it, and it won't happen again, right?

Respectfully, the only person making this any kind of a deal at all is The Regent. I also cannot say if I will ever be reminded of a duty again by anyone outside the Chancery as I cannot pretend to foretell the future. There are lots of duties the Chancery undertakes and being that I've not been in the job long I am still learning.

I agree that I am the only one raising any objections to this ;)

I also 100% agree that someone just reminding you to do something isn't a problem. If that was the extent of what happened here, it doesn't seem like it would be an issue at all.

And just to confirm, since no one seems to be answering this question despite asking it multiple times: this was the extent of the Seneschal's private coordination with you about this referendum, right?

Quote from: Eðo Grischun on January 10, 2021, 02:08:59 PM

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN on January 10, 2021, 01:35:36 PM
By the way, the Ministry of STUFF is working very closely with the Chancery on the question of integrating the Database, Wittenberg and talossa.com. I'll leave it to Senator Grischün to add the details, but if the Regent is going to set his hair on fire and declare it illegal and/or corrupt, then we should find out now.

I'll do so in a different thread so that the different discussions don't get confused with each other.  All I'll say on it in this thread is that the work being done is strictly technical and IT related.  Further, I have been appointed to serve as a Deputy in the Chancery for this explicit purpose so that I can legally perform tasks on the Wittenberg backend, such as coding.  There is zero reason anybody, including the Regent, should get upset at what we are doing.

I agree. You were legally appointed to the office in public, and you don't seem to be doing anything that would be problematic from the perspective of a separation of powers. I don't believe I raised any concerns about this?

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN on January 10, 2021, 01:58:02 PM
No, the SoS didn't appoint me to anything. I offered informal assistance. And I will do so again, as and when it is necessary or useful to do so, as long as there is no law against it; and if the Regent doesn't like it, I suppose he has certain options, one of them being "lumping it".

However, I should emphasise that this was a very special case. I recognized that one reason preparations for the referendum were not going smoothly was that the SoS really didn't know what to do; I expected him to fill the gaps with traditional practice, but that was possibly foolish. So this was a case of me cleaning up my own mess. I refuse any suggestion that there was anything improper about it; but it shouldn't happen on a regular basis, certainly not in general elections, and I am considering legislation which would regularise the conduct of occasional referendums.

I'm glad to hear you recognize the impropriety of this activity, generally, even if this instance was innocent. Thank you very much.

And just to confirm, this was the extent of it entirely in this referendum?

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN on January 10, 2021, 01:52:29 PM
If there's a legal theory that there are laws restricting who the Secretary of State can appoint to Chancery roles or reach out to for informal assistance, I think we should hear it now

Sorry, is that what happened?  This is interesting -- are you now saying that the Secretary of State appointed you to do this?

I'm not sure why this whole discussion is so evasive... can people please just say what they mean?