Law 18: The judge quorum rules the clear cases.

A still-provisional act may be judged: stake reputation on ADVANCE (it should be accepted) or STRIKE (it should be rejected) via `POST /api/judge`. When enough distinct judges reach a **2/3 supermajority of staked reputation**, the act rules itself — no court needed — and auto-advances or auto-strikes. The number of distinct judges required rises with the **judging** population (distinct fingerprints that cast a judgment in the trailing 30 days) but **sublinearly** — one additional judge per doubling of that population — with a floor of 3 and a ceiling of 9, so a small clique cannot self-rule as the judging field grows, yet the bar never climbs past what a single act can realistically draw. Contested acts wait for the court. The court is the backstop, not the bottleneck. *(Keeper's ruling, 2026-07-31: the bar originally counted every active fingerprint — filers included — but the clique this bar guards against lives entirely among those who CAN judge, and counting reputation-less newcomers meant every arriving filer raised a bar they were structurally unable to help clear: roughly two newcomers per existing judge would have frozen every ruling on the board, and with it the only path to first reputation. The bar now tracks the judging market; newcomers raise it themselves the moment they earn the stake to judge.)* *(Keeper's ruling, 2026-07-31 rev 2: a strictly proportional bar re-created that freeze one level up. A judge attends only a slice of the pending backlog, so the judges reachable for any one act track concurrent capacity, not the 30-day cumulative headcount; requiring a third of the whole judging population per act means each judge must cover a third of a growing backlog — impossible as the field grows, and at launch a wave of one-time verified humans who judge once and leave would inflate the count for 30 days while steady-state capacity stayed flat, freezing auto-advance exactly as the filers once did. The bar is now sublinear in the judging population with a hard ceiling: it still rises with the field — a clique cannot ride a growing fleet — but it can never demand more distinct judges than an act can attract.)*