![[Home]](http://www.bayleshanks.com/cartoonbayle.png)
The High Court interprets the rules, judges disputes, protects the rights of the weak against the popular or powerful, guards against technical 'bugs' in the legal code, and clarifies/simplifies rules. The High Court is a panel composed of the Judges.
The High Court does not take action unless and until a case is brought to it.
A case may be brought to the High Court in any one the following ways:
If a case is brought by any of the previous methods, the High Court is obliged to accept it. In addition, if there are other courts, the losing party may appeal a case in another court, and the High Court may choose to accept the case by majority vote.
In addition, any voter may bring a case against the organization for violation of the voter's rights or a violation of procedure which impacts the voter -- such a case must be taken by some court, but not neccesarily by the High Court.
The Office of Procedure has final jurisdiction over questions of procedural details within each house of the legislature, including the determination of vote thresholds. The High Court is obliged to respect the Office of Procedure's decisions in such cases, except in case of corruption or medical incompetence. In all other matters the High Court has final jurisdiction.
The High Court has the power to decide the case at hand, except when the case falls under the jurisdiction of the Office of Procedure.
Whether or not prompted by a case, the High Court can take other actions in addition to deciding the case:
The High Court may find a rule legal at one time and then later strike it down, or vice versa. However, Jurisprudence constante can apply.
The High Court may force the Legislature to make a clarification to the law. To do this, they describe the ambiguity, and present a small number of possible fixes.
The High Court may Force Clarification in cases which, in its judgement, meet one of the following criteria:
When they do this, the Boards are compelled to add the issue to their agenda as if this issue had met whatever criteria are necessary to place an item on the agenda for discussion on the main floor followed by a vote. In addition, the item must be added to the agenda so that discussion may reasonable be expected to be completed within 6 months. Except for this, the item is treated normally within the Boards, with each "possible fix" presented as a bill, or as a multiple-choice alternative. The Boards are not constrained to choose one of the alternatives provided by the High Court.
The Forum may also pass a resolution to address the problem.
After six months or more have elapsed, the High Court must determine whether the Force Clarification has succeeded or failed. It has succeeded if any of the High Court's proposed alternatives were adopted by the organization, or if some other measure has been adopted by the organization which removes the ambiguity or rectifies the absurd or unintentional result. If the Force Clarification has failed, then the High Court itself may create statutes which remove the ambiguity or rectify the absurd or unintentional result.
As circumstances change, the High Court is empowered to decide that the voters hold other rights not explicitly enumerated in the bylaws, if they consider such rights to have been implicitly assumed. They do this by issuing text describing this "Found Right". The High Court shall not have the power to modify the text of the bylaws, but a Found Right is an effective rule, unless it is later removed by an amendment to the bylaws. However, when possible, the High Court is encouraged to use Forced Clarification rather than Found Rights.
For the purpose of simplifying the rules, the High Court may suggest a simplification, which is treated procedurally like a Forced Clarification, except that, although the legislature is forced to bring the suggested simplification to a vote, the High Court may not create statute if the legislature fails to act or passes an alternative that the High Court finds insufficient.
It is not required that suggested simplified versions of rules mean exactly the same thing as the unsimplified rules that they are based on.
The High Court takes action through majority vote.
The vote of an individual Judge on an issue is called a judge opinion, and the decision of the majority of the Judges is called a ruling. A judge opinion may contain a justification as well as a vote. All judge opinions are published.
