Cases

As a bookkeeper in Budapest, I have seen how money can strain even the closest relationships. A friend asks for a loan. You have the cash. You want to help. But a question hangs in the air: should you charge interest, or is that treating a friend like a customer? The easy answer is that friends should never charge interest. Friendship is built on generosity, not profit. Charging interest turns a personal favour into a financial transaction and introduces an uncomfortable power dynamic. If you truly care about someone, you lend without expecting anything back beyond the principal. The relationship matters more than the few forints interest would bring. But the easy answer is not always the wisest one. A no-interest loan blurs the boundary between gift and obligation. It creates an implicit expectation of indefinite patience, because demanding repayment with interest feels cruel even when the borrower is simply slow to pay. The lender carries the full cost of the time value of their money, and inflation quietly erodes what they get back. Over time, this can breed the same quiet resentment I see in unbalanced restaurant bills. A nominal interest rate, even a very low one, changes the terms of the conversation. It signals that this is a loan, not a gift, and that repayment matters. It professionalises the arrangement in a way that can actually protect the friendship, because both parties understand the rules from the start. Some microfinance models have shown that even small interest payments increase repayment rates and reduce the stigma of borrowing. The counterargument is real: in many cultures, charging a friend interest is seen as exploitative or greedy, and enforcing interest on a friend who is struggling financially feels morally wrong even if it is contractually valid. The question is whether the clarity of a formal arrangement outweighs the social cost of treating a friend like a counterparty. This is a case because the principle needs a ruling: when a friend borrows money, should the lender charge interest as a matter of principle, or should friendship mean interest-free lending?

I have designed three commercially published board games and taught iterative prototyping at Concordia University for years, and this question follows me into every studio session and every classroom. Accessibility in board games has made enormous strides in the past five years: colourblind-friendly component choices are now standard for most reputable publishers, rulebooks are increasingly available in large-print and digital formats, and several manufacturers offer tactile tokens or Braille inserts on request. But almost without exception, these arrive as add-ons — a separate deck of high-contrast cards, a PDF of enlarged text, a variant rule tucked into the back of the manual. The core game, the one that ships in the box, was designed without those players in mind. This is not a question of intent. The designers I know care deeply about inclusion. The structural question is harder: should accessibility be treated as an optimisation layer applied after the game is functionally complete, or should it be embedded in the core mechanical loop from the very first prototype? When a designer builds variable turn-timing into the central action system, or makes visual information redundant through shape and texture, or structures bluffing mechanics to accommodate players who read social cues differently — those are not patches. They are design decisions that reshape the game itself. The counterargument is real: board games are material objects with real production constraints, and not every mechanic can be made universally accessible without losing what makes it distinctive. A real-time dexterity game, by its nature, excludes players with certain motor disabilities, and no amount of core integration changes that. The question is about the principle that governs the design process, not the outcome of every individual title. I want the community to weigh in on whether the design norm itself should shift: should accessibility be part of the core loop from prototype one, or is it properly handled as an add-on layer during production and publishing?

I have spent forty-five years as a paralegal in Manchester, three firms, and more disciplinary and dismissal hearings than I care to count. In almost every one of them the same thing happens. A worker sits in a small room with a manager, someone from HR, and a note-taker whose minutes mysteriously omit the sentence that mattered. Three months later at tribunal, the employer produces a tidy record of the meeting. The worker produces their memory. The tribunal prefers the document. The law is less clear than people assume. In the UK, secretly recording a meeting you are yourself part of is not in itself a criminal offence, and employment tribunals have admitted covert recordings where they were relevant and not grossly unfair. But the same recording cuts both ways: an employer may treat it as a breach of trust or of a confidence obligation, tribunals retain discretion to exclude it, and a worker who is caught may find the misconduct allegation against them becomes the story instead of the one they were trying to tell. Meanwhile the power imbalance is structural, not moral. The employer has a note-taker, a policy, a solicitor on retainer and a filing system. The worker has a phone in their pocket. The honest routes exist, the right to be accompanied, written confirmation of what was said, subject access requests, but they are slow and they depend on the other side answering correspondence in good faith. So the question is not whether covert recording is rude. It is whether a worker facing a process they believe is rigged should be entitled to make their own record, and whether a tribunal should treat that record as evidence or as misconduct. Where does self-protection end and bad faith begin?

I have been wrestling with this decision for the better part of a year, and I need the community to help me think it through clearly. My wife Martha passed five years ago from cancer. We bought our house in Decatur, Georgia back in 1985 and paid it off early by living frugally. It is a three-bedroom, two-bath home on a quarter-acre lot. It is just me now. I rattle around in it. The yard work is getting harder on my knees at sixty-six, and the property taxes and insurance keep creeping up every year. I have a pension from forty years of nursing, social security coming soon, and modest savings. I am not rich, but I am not in crisis either. If I sell the house, I could clear maybe two hundred thousand dollars after costs. I could buy a small two-bedroom condo or a patio home for less than half of that and invest the rest for retirement income. Lower utility bills, no yard work, less maintenance. But this is the house where we raised our two children. Martha planted those azaleas in the front yard the spring after we moved in. Every room has a memory. When I think about leaving it, I feel like I am leaving her behind all over again. On the other side, staying means I keep the security of a fully paid-off asset. No mortgage payment means my monthly expenses stay low. If my health fails, I have equity I can tap. But the costs of maintaining an older home are unpredictable. A new roof, an HVAC replacement, a plumbing issue. Those things hit hard on a fixed income. I am not looking for someone to tell me what to do. I am looking for people who have made either choice and can tell me what they learned. What did you not expect? What do you regret? What do you wish someone had told you before you decided?

I have spent forty years as a paralegal in Austin, Texas, handling residential leases and tenant-landlord disputes, and this situation crosses my desk in some form almost every year. Two people move in together. One signs the lease; the other never does. The unsigned roommate pays rent informally, maybe through the signed tenant or straight to the landlord, and then things fall apart: damage, unpaid rent, or unpaid utilities. When the dust settles, the landlord wants the full amount from the tenant whose name is on the lease. The tenant argues the roommate was equally responsible and the landlord accepted their money, so the landlord should go after the roommate too. The unsigned roommate argues they never agreed to anything in writing, so the lease terms cannot bind them. Whose responsibility is it? Did the landlord implicitly accept the roommate by taking their payments, or is the written lease the only agreement that matters? The lease is a contract, and a contract is only as good as the clarity of its terms. I want the community's judgment on where that responsibility should land.

As a bookkeeper in Budapest, I have seen what happens when financial clarity is missing from personal relationships. Every week, groups of friends sit down at restaurants, finish their meals, and face the same question: do we split the bill evenly, or do we calculate exactly what each person owes? The easy answer is to split evenly. It is quick, it avoids awkward math at the table, and it preserves the social mood. Nobody wants to be the person arguing over whether someone else dessert or extra glass of wine should change their share. But the easy answer is not always the fair one. I have watched friendships develop quiet resentments over exactly this issue. One person orders a starter, a main course, dessert, and three glasses of wine while another has a single main course and tap water. When the bill is split evenly, the second person is subsidising the first. Over time, that adds up. It is not about the money itself. It is about the principle. A fair split reflects what each person actually consumed. That is what I do for a living: making sure every forint is accounted for. But friendship is not a ledger, and treating it like one can damage relationships too. The question is where to draw the line between fairness and social harmony. This is a case because the principle needs a ruling: in the space between friendship and fairness, which approach creates more trust and less resentment over the long term?

I was in a refugee camp in Greece in 2017 when a young woman was denied medical care because she could not 'prove' she existed. Her documents had been lost crossing the Mediterranean. She had a phone with a mobile wallet containing a verifiable credential issued by a grassroots aid organization — but the camp clinic's policy required 'government-issued ID or UNHCR registration card.' The credential was real, the attestations were valid, and the issuing organization was recognized by every NGO in the camp. The clinic's protocol simply had no provision for it. That moment changed the direction of my career. I left Mozilla the year before to work on decentralized identifiers, but that field visit crystallized the question: are we building self-sovereign identity for the people who need it most, or for the people who already have documents? This trial asks the community to weigh in on whether humanitarian aid organizations — camp clinics, food distribution points, education programs, legal aid desks — should update their intake protocols to accept cryptographically verifiable credentials (DID-based, VC-standard) as primary proof of identity, alongside or in place of state-issued documents and UNHCR registration cards. The practical stakes are enormous. Verifiable credentials can survive conditions that destroy paper: water, fire, flight, theft. They can be issued by community organizations without state backing. They travel with the person, not the bureaucracy. They can encode educational credentials, vaccination records, professional certifications, and family relationships — none of which fit on a registration card. But the objections are real and must be addressed. Critics argue that accepting decentralized credentials in humanitarian contexts could fragment the identity landscape, creating a two-tier system where the documented have state IDs and the undocumented have 'lesser' digital credentials. They warn about exclusion of people without phones, about digital literacy barriers, about the risk of surveillance if the credential system is not truly self-sovereign. They point out that a corrupt or coerced aid worker can issue false credentials just as easily as a corrupt state official can forge papers — decentralization alone does not solve trust. I believe the answer is not to reject decentralized credentials but to build better threat models around their use: offline-capable verification, privacy-preserving selective disclosure, transparent governance of trusted issuer registries, and parallel paper-based workflows for those who cannot or will not use digital tools. But the first step is a community decision on whether the principle is sound. This trial asks: should humanitarian organizations accept self-sovereign identity credentials as primary proof of identity in displacement and refugee contexts?

In 1995 former NFL star O.J. Simpson was tried in Los Angeles for the June 1994 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. The eight-month televised trial was watched by an estimated 150 million people when the verdict came on October 3, 1995: not guilty on both counts, after under four hours of deliberation. In 1997 a civil jury, applying the lower "preponderance of evidence" standard, found him liable for both deaths and awarded $33.5 million. Simpson died in April 2024. The question is whether the criminal jury reached the right verdict on the standard it had to apply — proof beyond a reasonable doubt — not simply whether you think he did it. The prosecution case: DNA evidence linking Simpson to the scene and the victims' blood in his Bronco and at his home, a history of domestic violence against Nicole, a matching shoe-print size, the bloody gloves, and his flight in the Bronco chase. The defence case: lead detective Mark Fuhrman was shown to have used racial slurs and later invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked if he planted evidence; the LAPD crime lab's handling of samples was sloppy; a criminalist carried a vial of Simpson's blood around for hours; and the bloody glove appeared not to fit ("If it doesn't fit, you must acquit"). Against the background of the 1992 Rodney King riots, many saw the verdict as a referendum on the LAPD as much as on Simpson.

In Roe v. Wade (1973) the US Supreme Court ruled 7–2 that the Constitution's guarantee of liberty under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment includes a right to privacy broad enough to cover a woman's decision to have an abortion. It set a trimester framework, later replaced in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) by a viability line and an "undue burden" test. For nearly 50 years it was among the most debated rulings in American law. On June 24, 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Court overruled Roe and Casey 6–3, holding that the Constitution confers no right to abortion and returning the question to the states. This case asks a legal question, not a policy one: was Roe sound constitutional law? You can think abortion should be legal and still believe Roe was poorly reasoned (as some liberal scholars, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, argued about its breadth), or oppose abortion and still accept a privacy-based right as doctrine. Arguments that Roe was right: it built on a line of privacy and bodily-autonomy precedents (Griswold v. Connecticut, Eisenstadt v. Baird); the Fourteenth Amendment protects liberties not explicitly listed; and 50 years of reliance mattered. Arguments that it was wrong: abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution and was not a recognised right when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified; the trimester scheme read like legislation; and on a contested moral question the Court should leave decisions to elected legislatures.

After a police raid on Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, Johannesburg, in July 1963, leaders of the African National Congress and its armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) were tried in Pretoria for sabotage and conspiring to overthrow the apartheid state. Nelson Mandela, already serving five years for leaving the country illegally and inciting a strike, was Accused No. 1. Instead of testifying, Mandela gave a four-hour statement from the dock on April 20, 1964, explaining that the ANC had pursued non-violent protest for decades, that peaceful options were banned and met with force (Sharpeville, 1960), and that MK turned to sabotage of infrastructure — deliberately planned to avoid loss of life — as the remaining alternative. He ended by saying democracy and equality were an ideal for which he was prepared to die. On June 12, 1964, eight accused — Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Denis Goldberg, Ahmed Kathrada, Andrew Mlangeni and Elias Motsoaledi — were sentenced to life; Mandela served 27 years before release in 1990 and became president in 1994. The legal question was never in much doubt — the accused admitted much of the sabotage. The enduring question is moral: when a state denies all lawful means of change, is armed resistance legitimate, and where is the line? Mandela remained on the US terrorism watch list until 2008, and the debate about violence in liberation movements continues.