Games

WRIT

Bind the breach with law. The type chart is the Constitution.

Skill this builds: Match a rights violation to the constitutional provision that actually reaches it, calculate when a case is weakened enough to bind, identify the decided case behind each instrument, and walk a courthouse whose term runs out whether or not you are finished.
About: About 22 minutes · Standards: C3, NCSS · Plays offline

You are a Clerk of the Republic, and Liberty the eagle is on your shoulder. Breaches are rights violations given a form you can face. Choose an era and a run: a RECORD run walks the sequence the record actually went in, a WILDCARD run generates a docket that never happened and says so. Walk the courthouse — the Counsel's chambers, the two courtrooms, the anteroom where the OVERREACH keeps its papers. Every step costs days off the term. Argue with real legal instruments, each strong against some breaches and useless against others, then SERVE THE WRIT to bind. Argue too long past the binding window and it hardens.

Every instrument in this game is a real legal remedy, every breach is a real category of rights violation carrying its decided case, and every lieutenant of the OVERREACH is an abuse somebody documented at the time. The creatures are inventions; the doctrine is not. Three things are deliberate. First: BREACHES ARE ACTS, NEVER INSTITUTIONS. There is no agency in this game to defeat, because the standard is that institutions are not villains — unconstitutional acts are, and the same office does lawful work on Tuesday and unlawful work on Wednesday. Second: the Counsels are historical people whose words are in the public domain, and every one of them is shown with something the record also holds against them or against the position they took, because respect and reverence are not the same thing and this game owes you the first and not the second. Third: this is education and not legal advice. Real cases turn on facts a game cannot give you.

Playing as

Your Beacon

Change

Choose an era

Choose the run

Record run

The era's docket in the order the record actually went in — earliest decided case first, the era's own courts in the order they sit, its own Counsel, its own lieutenant of the OVERREACH.

RECORD RUN. This sequence is the order the record went in, and the year beside each breach is the year of the decision that answers it.

Wildcard run

A docket drawn from the whole two-and-a-half centuries at once: four breaches from any era, a Counsel who may not be from the era they are advising, a lieutenant drawn at random, and wider variance on every number.

WILDCARD RUN. This docket never happened in this order. Every breach, every citation and every lieutenant in it is real and sourced; the SEQUENCE is generated, and the game will not pretend otherwise.

The point

You just learned a type chart, and the type chart was the Bill of Rights. That is the whole trick of this game and it is not a trick at all — the reason a Fourth Amendment argument bounces off a censorship case is not arbitrary, it is that each provision does one job and does not reach past it. Lawyers call it 'the right hook'. Finding the provision that actually reaches your facts IS the work, and the reason a case is lost is more often that somebody brought the wrong instrument than that they were wrong about the wrong being done. Notice too what you never fought: an agency, a party, a person. Every breach here was an ACT. The same office that did the unlawful thing on Wednesday did lawful work on Tuesday, and a citizen who cannot hold both of those in mind at once is going to be useless at this. And notice the last thing the building taught you, which no card game can: the term ended. It ended whether or not your docket was finished, and the walk to the Counsel's chambers was paid for out of the same term as the argument itself. Choosing which case to reach is not a failure of the system. It is the job.