The Joint Monitor Council's finding on the Kelvant-Korda referendum was two to one, and this paper covered the majority's reasoning last week. What we did not ask, until the dissent gave us reason to, was what happens to the two Territorial court seats currently sitting inside the corridor that is about to leave.
Judicial Monitor General Kessa Vray raised it directly. The majority's own assessment calls relocating those seats "achievable but not automatic." Vray asked what happens in the interval between a court leaving and a court arriving, and whether the people with cases pending during that stretch are anyone's responsibility in particular.
We put a version of that question to all four Legat Consul candidates: what would you do about the two seats?
Seren Mak
"I think the Monitor is right to flag it, and I think the process will sort it out. That's what the process is for."
Accurate as far as it goes. Not an answer to what the LC's office would actually do.
Ines Carrow
"The Judicial Pool exists precisely so that a vacancy doesn't become a crisis. I'd trust the Pool and the sitting judges to manage a relocation the way they've managed every other administrative transition. I don't think this needs a Legat Consul's intervention to work."
A real position, and consistent with Carrow's usual instinct toward existing institutions over new intervention.
Tobias Vael
"Ask the judges. Not me."
Four words. We did, in fact, ask a judge, and will get to that below.
Pell Sandris
"The Monitor's concern is specific, so the answer should be specific too. Relocating a court seat mid-docket means someone's case gets heard by a different judge than the one who's read the file, or gets delayed until the new judge catches up. Neither is acceptable as an accident. I'd want the transition plan published before the referendum, not after — which cases move with the judge, which stay with the seat, and a hard date by which every pending matter has a judge of record. That's not a policy position. It's the plan the finding says doesn't exist yet."
Sandris is again the candidate willing to treat a Monitor's finding as a specification rather than a talking point. Whether that habit serves him with voters more interested in outcomes than mechanisms remains, as it has all cycle, an open question.
What a Sitting Judge Told Us
We asked, per Vael's suggestion. A judge currently seated in one of the two affected courts, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is pending before the body that oversees judicial administration, gave us this:
"Nobody has told me anything. I read the finding the same day everyone else did. If there's a plan, it hasn't reached the bench it's supposed to move."
That is, as far as this paper can determine, the current state of the transition Vray's dissent was asking about. Whether it changes before the referendum is scheduled is not yet known.