Black_Hole said:
I agree, the amendment was denied 3-0 last term, and the authors haven't fixed the problems.
Mr. CJ please rule this JR to have no merit
This court has ruled in case 6-1 that restrictions on the right to be eligible to hold an office are allowed. Since the previous ruling on this amendment was based
solely on the idea that restrictions to be eligible to hold an office are not allowed, it logically follows that the amendment needs to be re-reviewed to see if there are any other conflicts with current law.
If a citizen wanted the amendment text to be changed before it was resubmitted, then the suggested change should have been raised in the amendment thread.
Robboo's request is accepted as
case 6-6.
Donsig claims a potential conflict of interest because I initiated the original amendment. Having an opinion on a subject doesn't by itself reflect a conflict of interest. If I had something to gain, then there would be the possibility of a conflict, but there is no demonstratable gain from reviewing it. It is still possible that the citizens might not ratify the amendment, and if it is ratified it merely affects future events. It is not even clear that the court won't find some other conflict and rule it as ineligible on some other grounds.
As for courts overturning the results of prior courts, that happens all the time in real life and there is no reason not to expect it to happen in this game. The U.S. Supreme Court just overturned itself, on the issue of no-knock search warrants, saying that police who fail to knock and pause might be subject to civil or even criminal charges if the urgency of the case turns out not to justify speedy entry, but that evidence obtained in this way should not be automatically excluded. The previous ruling was for automatically excluding the evidence.
As I've said many times, very few Democracy
Game decisions should ever be considered permanent. There are some things we won't do, like reloading a save, but when it comes to humans making decisions we pretty much always allow that decision to change.
The role of the Judiciary in reviewing laws is to
help the people by ensuring new laws aren't so flawed that they can't be implemented without an immediate JR, not to
prevent the people from changing laws. We should allow all but the amendments with the very worst legal conflicts to get a fair vote by the people, and not act as the
committee to say no.
I am heartened to hear these words of yours. Some of us who have been around these demogames for a couple years now can clearly see the pitfalls of writing DG laws. No matter how much effort is put into foreseeing all, it is impossible to to plan for all those non-obvious scenarios. (That's a great term by the way.) The more scenarios planned for, the more complex the law must be. Since there are times when these non-obvious scenarios cannot wait for the next election cycle to resolve them we can only fall back on our laws as they are written. There are two ways, between elections, to handle unresolved non-obvious scenarios. One is through the judiciary and another is through citizen initiative. Unfortunately, in this DG, the judiciary was a bit marred when it refused to acknowledge and properly act on a conflict of interest. As for formal citizen's initiatives, that idea is a new addition to our constitution and, despite some attempts, was never really put to the test during this game. If that concept ever gets established we will have to work out what happens when a citizen initiative (with the force of law) is passed but conflicts with existing law.
Is this the very same exact amendment that was reviewed (and found to conflict with current law) last term? Re-reviewing proposed amendments should certainly be a 
since it sets a precedent that future courts can revisit whatever past rulings they want! I am quite dismayed to see this request especially when the discussion thread shows the new JR request was instigated by the current CJ! I can see we still have not learned anything about conflict of interest in this game. [sigh]
