Judgment channel: pitfalls

Wrong forms, silent outcomes, diagnostics, typical formalizer and AI-agent mistakes, and how to detect them. “Confirmed by running” items were reproduced in this study on installed law (semantics law.core/0.2).

OverviewBoundariesCorpus formsPitfalls

1. A silent judge as FALSE_ONLY

“The court stayed silent — so the condition is unmet” — no: before an adjudicated assertion the result is NEITHER with REQUIRES_JUDGMENT. Silence never reads as ACTIVE nor as achievement. In a composite condition every judge-leaf gets the query with a NEITHER pair while the whole condition is NEITHER; once the other leaves decide, there is no query. Detection: expect evaluation_status == REQUIRES_JUDGMENT, not only truth_status.

2. An answer of the wrong origin (confirmed by running)

Only origin adjudicated closes the channel. A court answer filed as case_input is ordinary support: if the head is a judgment relation, it closes anyway (a fact is a fact), but the organ and form (judgment) checks never run; another’s evaluation filed as adjudicated passes for the organ’s answer (an answer without judgment is an assertion of the relation). Detection: name the origin literally in tests; in doubtful places demand a judgment object with organ and form.

3. A dead rule awaiting a judge

A query comes only from a live rule: a refuted neighbour, a false comparison, false, a support found under not_known, a diverging status test make the rule dead — the answer is NEITHER/COMPUTED with empty judgmentRequests. The exception is a refuted test over the judgment relation itself at NEITHER: “is it refuted” undecided yet, the judge decides, the rule is live. Detection: a control pair of scenarios (dead rule silent / live rule asking).

4. A question without kind

A question literal is the same Literal as in CLIR, with mandatory kind: "literal". An off-schema question is rejected before computation (QUERY_INVALID), never answered in another sense. Historically the same question without kind gave COMPUTED where with kind it is REQUIRES_JUDGMENT, with no single diagnostic. Detection: the question schema.

5. An invented threshold instead of an organ

“‘Excessive = over N’ as a number in a rule” substitutes counting for the channel. If the criterion is genuinely countable (42 hours of rest), this is not judgment but a fact with a threshold from the text; if evaluative (“plainly excessive”) — a judgment relation, and inventing a number is forbidden. The reverse mistake: the countable given to the judge — eternal waiting for an unneeded answer. Detection: the three-way fork (judgment / court fact / reading) — in a comment on every evaluative feature, as in the Turkish constitution.

6. A typo in authority

A declaration’s authority is the institution’s StableId, not a term: needs no declaration, checked by equality. A typo (Cort for Court) gives no diagnostics — the real organ’s answer is simply never accepted (JUDGMENT_AUTHORITY_MISMATCH on an answer with judgment, silence on an answer without it), and the case hangs in REQUIRES_JUDGMENT forever. Detection: grep authority across the package and reconcile with the answer’s organ.

7. A judge through defeat and immunity correctly silent

A defeasible rule whose defeater already gave an application with no priority over it gives no query: no adjudicated assertion revives it. A power whose effect is locked by an applicable undefeated immunity is not live: no query from valid_when, the answer is NEITHER/COMPUTED. This is not a channel defect but liveness: the judge’s answer changes nothing. Detection: read the defeat/immunity outcome before the query path.

8. AI-agent trap: writing the answer for the judge

“‘The court will presumably find the measure proportionate’” is forbidden: a presumption is a fact without support, and support without origin. A test with an invented adjudicated passes but proves the test author’s imagination, not law. Close the channel in examples only with a marked synthetic answer (origin adjudicated in a teaching case), in the corpus only with a real one.

9. Words after “bearer” — lowercase only

Write bearer/holder only as lowercase keywords.

10. Judgment channel without authority — LDC-E0201

A body without an organ never names who decides — a static LDC-E0201 refusal (“judge without an organ”; the mutation cutting authority Court; expects exactly this code). Not to confuse with item 6: a typo in the organ stays silent until execution, while a missing organ already fails check. Detection: the same mutation — cut authority from a copy of the example and expect LDC-E0201.