Greetings Esteemed Magisterium,
Today I want to bring nominations forward for @Ulmer and @Domais for Arbiter. Both have spent time and my ministers of Research and Records and shown great aptitude for attention to detail tasks, as the conclave calls for. Thank you! 
I feel that both individuals are highly qualified for the position of Arbiter, especially given their MORR backgrounds. I see no reason to oppose at first glance.
Since Aivintis is no longer here to ask the traditional question, can the nominees please provide their analysis of the 2022 ConCrisis?
Thanks for the question, Lado. As a true fit for the position and since I obviously wasn’t around back then, I have had a lot of fun reading through other people answering this very traditional question on my way for research. Sprayed in a few opinions of myself lol.
So there we go. „It was nonsense“, to quote AMOM, whilst, as a legal fanatic, I think its very, very interesting to read about. Essentially a rogue court trying to repeal itself, setting back the government to 2019 (I am going to leave more hypothetical political suspicions, like motivations, for the case out of my analysis, cause I really only want to talk about the legal side). Anyhow from the beginning.
The February 2020 Concordat was introduced, passed, and ratified through the amendment process. However, it is not actually a legitimate amendment. It also neither repeals nor replaces the July 2019 Concordat, being illegitimate and therefore inactive.
To make it simple, it was a misinterpretation of the words „repeal and replace“. As correctly stated multiple times in the past, such a process does not exist. But as you Ladona have marked on discord as well, functionally the constitutional amendment was a repeal and replace creating a new constitution (together with the political advertisement of the amendment using these words). The entire process was done as any regular constitutional amendment, following a magisterium vote and citizen referendum. It went bigger than an amendment usually does, but its procedurally nothing different. So you can truly speak of a „legal continuity between the Old and New Concordat“. And not take the most dramatic and destructive route possible of saying that the entire government and current constitution is illegal and nuke it back into 2019, simply because all of the text got changed. Instead the similarity to the normal constitutional amendment should have been noted and instead (which is like the only thing one could, if wanted, critique): the stylistic use of the words repeal and replace. But in no world do I see such a dramatic legal effect of these simple words.
A second big point is, that the Conclave was never even allowed to do such a ruling on the Concordat itself in the first place. And I can make it out quiet simply with this principle: the Concordat establishes the branches of government, another branch of the government should be systematically (and logically) not be able to wink itself out of existence by separating the root from the tree. Also, more specifically, the conclave rules on actions/laws of the executive.
To take another drive around the block. At my uni I have learned about material requirements and requirements of form/process in actual procedural law. Whilst such a miswording is, as we have seen, dangerous, stuff like this can get healed. Simply laying it out as a constitutional amendment would have saved a lot of trouble. Not immediately crying for complete new elections would have helped by calmly clarify the legal situation for a second and third time. But it gave us interesting questions to ask the nominees.
Lastly, whilst I think that following procedures is important and I love to go into procedural details and nickpick them, I do believe that the spirit of law and the openness of interpretation is very important, but as I learned at uni there are so many more environmental factors always playing a role, and not destroying a regional government of a fictional political simulator should be decisive at that lol.
Hope that’s good enough. The Conclave at that time did not work properly with an interpretation I disagree with. Thanks for the question once more!
To both nominees:
While, as Arbiters, you’re expected to keep a neutral, impartial view when it comes to the law, I would like to ask…
What legal perspective would you say you would bring to the Conclave?
Thanks for the question, Irene. Definitely not improper, though I dont think I have really figured that out myself.
I definitely think I am a dutiful person, so Ill be impartial and neutral all the time. I think it does really depend on the case, because I believe I have certain facets of interpreting a law. It always depends on the environmental factors outside of the legal basis, but which I dont think we will have trouble with too often. So I will just go ahead with a clear meaning of the law and a eagle-flying perspective of the words. Not much ornate decoration.
What do you mean?
Just a perspective from above, considering the environmental factors, having a neutral view to consider the legal issue.
Edit: Forgot the eagle part of my word creation. Also a detailed view, because eagles have sharp eyes.
But you said, “a eagle-flying perspective” of “the words”.
That doesn’t sound the same as “a perspective from above, considering the environmental factors, having a neutral view”, which I read to mean a broader perspective?
So is it of the words, or do you mean the totality of a case?
And what do you mean with “environmental factors” specifically? Like, in the context of the cases we usually tended to have in the Conclave in TEP here?
I don’t want to be difficult or anything, and I certainly don’t want this to come off like an attack or something, but you’re confusing me.
I very much like your response about the ConCrisis though, that was spot on.
Am I right that we have no responses from @Domais yet?
I apologize for the delay in answering. It’s been a busy week IRL, and this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down and write out my thoughts.
First, I want to address the legal perspective I’d bring to the Conclave if confirmed as an Arbiter. I’m very interested in law. I’m not a lawyer or a paralegal, but I’ve read real-world case law and can navigate a court ruling. I think my take on the ConCrisis best shows how I approach the law.
So, the ConCrisis. Honestly, coming from someone who spent many years in Lazarus, NationStates’ very own Balkans, it was one of the stupidest things I have ever seen or heard of in a GCR.
The Conclave’s position was simple. The Concordat contained no mechanism for repealing itself, so any amendment claiming to “repeal and replace” it was illegal and void. But the ruling itself concedes a crucial fact: the February 2020 Concordat was “introduced, passed, and ratified through the amendment process.” The Magisterium approved it, and the Citizenry ratified it by referendum, exactly as the Concordat prescribed at the time.
In other words, the Conclave didn’t really take issue with the process. Rather, it objected to the label. But a comprehensive rewrite, duly passed under the amendment process in force at the time, doesn’t become invalid just because it calls itself a “repeal and replace.” The ruling also never established that the 2019 Concordat limited how much an amendment could change, either.
To get around this and hold that a procedurally valid amendment is somehow unconstitutional, the Conclave had to assume an unwritten limit on the amendment power. In constitutional law, this is generally known as a “basic structure” doctrine: the idea that certain fundamental features of a constitution can’t be amended away. Some real-world courts take this view. In Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala (1973), the Supreme Court of India ruled 7-6 that it could strike down any constitutional amendment that destroyed the constitution’s fundamental architecture. Other countries write the limit directly into the constitution’s text. Germany’s Basic Law contains an “eternity clause,” permanently forbidding any amendment that abolishes the nation’s core democratic and human rights principles.
The problem is that the Concordat had no equivalent provision. The Conclave didn’t point to anything in the actual text that established such a limitation. Instead, it derived one from an undefined concept of the “social contract.”
And that’s where the reasoning becomes particularly difficult to defend. The Conclave argued the social contract “demands rule of law, rather than acquiescence to the popular will.” Yet its conclusion relied on placing an unwritten superlegal principle above the amendment procedure. You can’t ground an argument in the rule of law while simultaneously disregarding the written rules in favor of restrictions that aren’t actually there. Rule of law means applying the rules that actually exist, not replacing it with whatever principles a court thinks ought to exist.
The argument that “no organ may act for another” falls into the same trap. The Concordat itself spelled out which bodies had to approve an amendment, and those bodies consented. Requiring additional organs to ratify an amendment effectively adds another condition to the amendment process. A requirement found nowhere in the text. That’s legislating from the bench, plain and simple.
Even setting all of that aside, the remedy was wildly disproportionate. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the words “repeals and replaces” did exceed the amendment power. The obvious remedy would have been to sever those words, while upholding the rest of the amendment. Instead, the Conclave voided more than two years of constitutional amendments and cast doubt on every law and election since.
And then there’s perhaps the most troubling part: the ruling concluded that the only fully legitimate institution left in the region was the Conclave itself, specifically the three Arbiters who signed the decision. Any court that interprets a constitution in a way that leaves itself as the sole surviving legitimate institution should expect extensive scrutiny from the region.
​That’s ultimately the approach I’d bring to the Conclave. Read the text for what it actually says, respect the procedures the region agreed to, and don’t reach for a broader remedy than the situation requires. An Arbiter’s job is to interpret and apply the law. That’s it. It’s not to rewrite the law because they disagree with the outcome those laws produce.