Kerim Aydin wrote: >Now, with no mechanism for a judge to determine civil reparations, >that's gone.
That mechanism was pretty ineffective. Being mandated by the rules didn't give it any greater strength than it would have had any other way. There's nothing stopping anyone setting up an arbitration service using contracts. Parties to a contract can then write into it that they agree to have disputes resolved by a particular arbitration service. The arbiter can issue `orders' that (by contract) are binding on the parties. The orders are backed up by the rule-mandated criminal procedure. Of course, the earlier step of arbitration, that of determining whether a particular action was in breach of contract or what obligations a contract actually imposes, is and always was subject to ordinary (inquiry) CFJs. I think declaratory judgements can go a long way. A real-life court can pay attention to Agoran declaratory judgements if it wants to enforce an Agoran-law contract. > The criminal courts have no bearing on non-players, >as not only are the punishments meaningless, but the non-players >never agreed to be subject to them. Non-player parties to Agora-governed contracts have thereby agreed to be subject to the Agoran rules. It's only rule 1503 that (arguably) interferes with that. The relative irrelevance of the criminal penalties to non-players is a problem, perhaps we can work on that. But that was always a problem: reparative justice under Civil CFJs was limited to orders for specific performance, there was no way to impose a resolution. Failure to specifically perform was a rule violation, bringing us back to the same two problems. Ultimately, if you want a contract to be enforcable in practice then you need the governing legal system to be able to impose, without the ninny's cooperation, either an equitable judgement or criminal penalties that are of greater significance to the ninny. Neither Civil CFJs nor my hypothetical contractual arbitration service had/have the power to impose an equitable judgement such as a transfer of currencies. In both cases the only things that can be imposed are the criminal-style penalties of chokey and exile. For someone who doesn't want to be a player those are essentially null. So you'd be stupid to use Agoran law as the basis for your contract requiring a non-player to transfer real-life currencies. -zefram
