Tribunal Of Supreme Confederal Arbiters (TOSCA)

TOSCA - as one might guess - is the highest body in the AJM hierarchy, standing above all other local, regional, and confederal-level trial and appellate courts in the Aleckandorean Confederacy — as well as any confederate law enforcement, investigative, and counterintelligence organs and apparatuses working under Bureau Of Justice, Truth, & Virtue (JTVB) command. It is the highest interpreter of constitutional law for the realm, but unlike most supreme courts in other industrialized nation-states, the 13 Arbiters of the 'Capital-T Tribunal' are at liberty to utilize an algorithmically authorized arsenal of extralegal philosophy, psychology, and factual historic record to formulate their legal opinions as much as they rely upon the precedents of common law, the statutes of civil law, and the universal moral standards of customary law. The Victorious Constitutional Framers' Caucus (VCFC) felt that, when they were drafting Codex VII into the main CCRs that formally transform the Order Of The Sacred War (OSW) into a new Nord Yervhennian Confederacy, they took after the Semi-Decentralist Theory as posited by the martyred Main Founder in its view of the law and justice as more of a "weapon to use in the primordial intercivilizational and intracivilizational struggle by that which is functional and righteous against that which serves dysfunction and maladjustment" rather than simply as institutions of doctrinal constraints and social equity [Founder's Notebook XIII, Entry 09, Page 42 ~ Êrû Dízênd]. "Therefore," Eru wrote on, "A semi-decentralized system ought to protect the behavioral integrity of all relevant societal blocs for each other and from each other through the firm hand and iron heart of the Great Constitutional Judiciary; after all, if our intuitive notions of the truly sublime and the objective good find themselves in constant conflict with their noncontextual assailers, why should the defenders of such be barred from having the tools and means they need to have at their disposal in this purpose-driven argumentation?" [Entry 09, Page 45]

Another major distinction between other supreme courts of the world and TOSCA is that it works a lot closer with the more political branches of government. It is, for all intents and purposes, still an independent countermajoritarian judiciary with life-tenured officeholders; however, unlike supreme courts elsewhere, the Tribunal is neither afraid of nor prohibited at all from engaging in its own avenues for influencing both the purse and the sword of the Confederal Governancy. Quite interestingly, the Tribunal is capable of issuing a special type of majority/plurality advisory opinion called an Ödtsyû-Aithrúh-Éyídzhênck (a Shrinessyihn phrase meaning "Marker-Of-Recommendation"), which is then tacked onto either a piece of proposed legislation or an executive order by the requesters of such an opinion in order to expedite and circumvent the normal process of bill ratification for the former and to prevent future legal challenges by nonspeculatively injured parties by the latter. This has made TOSCA a highly-politicized kind of judiciary in that it can judge on matters of domestic and even foreign policy which could never be considered textually, logically, or customarily justiciable anywhere else. Granted though, the Arbiters are still by law supposed to act as a passive and reactive pillar of the Mechanica, and can only work on specific filings which happen to get onto their court docket in a timely, proper, and respectfully procedural fashion. In any given year, they and their personal Referendariats of wish-pool law clerks receive about 50000 petitions in original jurisdiction per year — including hundreds of Öd-Aith-Éy letters from LegisCon Delegates, BuroColle Administrators, and occasionally, the CGX themselves and/or key members of their Executoreum Senior Staff. TOSCA can realistically only respond to about 10-15% of these from one year over a course of about two years, so they have full discretion over what cases, controversies, appeals, subpoenas, applications, and writs to hear, decide upon, remand, dismiss, delay, or discard.

[WIP]