The Good Law List

The Llama Award is computed over the Good Law List: instruments that repeal democracy-destroying law, or add democracy-repairing law.

The admission tests

An instrument gets on the list by satisfying at least one of eight tests, and the record says which:

repeal · restore · transparency · accountability · franchise · due_process · speech · purse

These are structural tests about the mechanism of self-government, not policy preferences. That is what makes the list usable by citizens who disagree with each other about almost everything — and it is checked out loud every time something is proposed, because the temptation to slip a preferred policy onto a list of democratic repairs is constant.

Each item carries

• a frozen key,
• a goodness rating, 1 to 100 — how much repair it delivers, which is its weight in the arithmetic,
• a citizen goodness vote, which orders the list and moves no rating.

That last distinction is the same one the problem side makes, for the same reason. Citizens should control what the movement looks at first. Letting a popular vote quietly reweight a published number about a named living person would turn the arithmetic into a poll.

The full library

The Good Law List is the assessed subset of the Good Laws library, which records every one of these instruments and what happened to it — passed, voted down, or never allowed a vote at all.