On Wed, Oct 11, 2000 at 10:19:14AM -0400, Robert D. Hilliard wrote: > Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> writes: > > > On Tue, Oct 10, 2000 at 04:44:20PM -0400, Buddha Buck wrote: > > > 1. The Social Contract cannot be modified under the Debian Constitution. > > > > This is the least controversial interpretation, because it allows for very > > little subjective projection of desired meaning onto the text of the > > Constitution. > > I disagree. This is, in my view, the most controversial > interpretation. I fully agree with the rest of your analysis. Yeah, "controversial" is a poor choice of terminology there, since it appears to be an entirely subjective phenomenon. I should probably have said something like "least surprising", or "most literal". > > Adjudicating disputes about the meaning of the Constitution (7.1.3) does > > not mean unilaterally introducing rules that have no foundation within it. > > This is the heart of the matter. It is akin to the U.S. > controversy over `activist' judges, who rule based on their beliefs of > what should be, rather than on what the law says. At least in U.S. > jurisprudence several levels of appellate review are available. Under > the Debian Constitution no such appeals are available. This is a far > more important point than the fate of John's GR. Yes, the long-running debate in the U.S. legal community comes consistently to my mind as well, but certain people accuse of lawyering quite enough without me pointing out parallels to the real-world legal profession, however apropos they might be. -- G. Branden Robinson | Software engineering: that part of Debian GNU/Linux | computer science which is too difficult branden@debian.org | for the computer scientist. http://www.debian.org/~branden/ |
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