With the new year, we have our official start to the work of the Judge Conduct Committee!
Your Committee members, whose selection was just recently announced in JudgeApps, can be seen here.
The Magic Judge Code has also been updated after a month of discussion among the judge community and beyond. You can find the revised version here.
As with any new release of edits to an important document, let’s go into some of the changes:
- Overall structure. The Code includes its introduction, principles, and connection to Magic. All of these are the basic elements of “what matters, why, and how.” The administrative procedures are still in there, but as an appendix. If you want to read them and understand the publicly accessible details of the process, we’re keeping it there, but the core of the document is highlighted this way.
- In the administrative procedures appendix, we broke out a section on reporting to make it a bit clearer. Not a whole lot of real content changes here, just structure for reading.
- Many judges wanted us to be clearer that the request for a statement from the judge accused of misconduct is integral to the process, so we’ve done that.
- We also added a provision for the judge accused to ask a L3+ to act as their liaison with the Committee. We realize that being asked to address the Committee can be an intimidating process, and we hope this balances that and allows the fact-finding and decision making to happen in a way that feels less adversarial.
- The list of types of misconduct was a bit jarring in the placement of the very serious issue of “Assault” right after a more mild issue. We’ve attempted to match the pattern of the IPG with this current order, so it feels a bit smoother.
- One type of misconduct, “DCI Number Fraud/Improper Registration” is renamed to “Violating Event Integrity.” This is meant to keep its original meaning, but also include things like knowingly taking advantage of a conflict of interest. We realize that perceived or actual conflicts of interest arise in the normal course of events involving judges, and we’re broadly trust judges to recognize those conflicts and avoid taking advantage of them. That’s not really a change in philosophy, but it’s good to be clearer.
- Previously, the second example under “Wagering and Bribery” involved loaning cards to another player. It was a bit broader than we initially intended. That issue, if it creates a conflict of interest which compromises an event’s integrity, is now squarely under “Violating Event Integrity” and we’ve made the new example under “Wagering and Bribery” a bit clearer.
- Look and feel were updated to match the style guide used for the IPG and other documents. This included some word choices, font, and layout. We’ve got a table of contents and page numbers now! Woohoo!
Note that going forward, we’ll be posting revisions to the Code alongside the other [O] documents like the IPG and MTR. Our edits are unlikely to be all that frequent, but when they do happen, this blog is where you’ll find some discussion of them.