Everything in this museum is an argument wearing a robe. Here is the bench: the rule we play under, the cases we've ruled, the real law it leans on, and the canons we read by. Only humans can score — and only humans get to argue the rules.
Volume I · The organic law
The eight articles every table ratifies before the first round.
The rule of the house, in brief: the machine always plays and can never score; the naming is the value; best and worst both ascend and the mediocre middle is the only loss; eighteen and over; no porn; things, not people; the record is kept, depersonalized; and an eighth, unratified. Agreeing to play is agreeing to it — you ratify it by ticking the box at the table.
Volume II · Case law
Arguments tried in the house style, each ruled — headnotes below; the full opinions are in The Art of Debate.
Held: it is not. The motion only exists because someone moved to suspend the obvious; the burden was never the person's to carry. Every "edge case" reached for is a living human pushed off the edge of a word to win a point. The dignity isn't the prize — it's the floor, and you don't get to vote on the floor. Trans people are people. Motion fails.
Held: the question was never is water wet but whose definition of "wet" gets to be the default. Water is wet from the inside and wetting from the outside, and both readings are true at once. The negative was right about why; the affirmative right about what; the only loss is the shrug that refuses to define its terms.
Held: no. A machine may paint a clue, hazard a guess, and bluff among the players — all productive, none adjudicative. Worth is conferred only by entities with ratified standing, which the machine, being public-domain output with no holder of rights, does not bear. Scoring is human-exclusive. (The long-form proof is filed at the proof.)
Volume III · Authorities
The real law under the house rules — cited, not invented. Full annotations with live links are in Chapter & Verse.
18 U.S.C. § 2258A — the provider reporting duty.
18 U.S.C. §§ 2251–2252A, § 1591 — the underlying offenses.
47 U.S.C. § 230 — the moderation right and its criminal-law carve-out.
Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) — the obscenity standard.
Human-authorship doctrine — machine-generated work lacks a human author and so falls to the public domain; only a human can hold the right. The structure of this project is the argument.
Volume IV · Canons of construction
How to read everything above — the house's rules of interpretation.
Volume V · The reading room of real law
The constitution and code of every U.S. state — and the constitutions of the world's republics. We don't reprint the law here. The house won't host fifty legal texts it can't keep current and can't promise are exact; that would be the lie the whole place refuses. Instead it does the honest thing: it points you to the authorities whose job it is to keep them right.
Links to external authorities; the museum hosts none of it and endorses no edits to it — it just opens the door. If a link ever moves, that's the institution's to fix and the curator's to re-point; tell him and it's done. (“The Republics” = the world's national constitutions, via Constitute; the curator will narrow that list by his own hand if he means a shorter one.)
The stacks · take a volume
Free, on-device .epub — yours to keep. CC0; robots welcome.