Re: PAC: Schedule and AIs for this cycle

[Terry Allen <tallen@sonic.net>]

Jon:
| | Jon wrote:
| | | [Robin Cover:]
| | | 
| | | | Why "business days"?  Suppose it's Fri-Sat-Sun?  (viz., are
| | | | weekend days "business days"?)
| | | 
| | | No, they're not -- and that's the point.  I think I picked up the
| | | phrase "business days" from Robert's.  My first impulse was to
| | | replace it with something more precise: weekdays.  But then I
| | | thought, No, what about holidays.  But the definition of "holiday"
| | | is going to be different depending on where you are... So the more
| | | I thought about it, the more I realized (a) that "business days"
| | | is precisely the legal phrase for the concept we want, and (b)
| | | that its slight ambiguity (or shall we say, context-sensitivity)
| | | is necessary to accommodate cultural differences.
| | 
| | What about the case where Wednesday is a holiday in France,
| | Thursday a holiday in England, and neither is holiday in the U.S.?
| 
| This is why it won't work to substitute something like "x days
| (not counting weekends and holidays)" for "x business days".  It
| just pushes the question of what constitutes a non-business day
| onto the word "holiday".

In the case given, assuming there are members from the various
countries (or even just travelling in the various countries),
is Wednesday a business day for the committee?

| | | Oddly, the term "business day" is not defined in any of my large
| | | dictionaries, but having just been through several months of
| | | househunting during which I've plowed through multiple sets of
| | | real estate contracts, I can testify that the concept of a
| | | "business day" is quite well established.
| | 
| | In any given jurisdiction, yes.  
| 
| Right.  It's always going to be up to the individual TC to figure
| out what constitutes a non-business day.  But we don't make this
| any clearer by shuffling that pea around under the shell of a
| different term (such as "holiday").

We don't help individual committees by leaving to them without
warning them we're doing so.  But anyway, I think this may be
unnecessary.  To wit,

| | | | "immediate succession"  -  What if a TC meets Fri, Sun, and 
| | | | Tues of a conference week?
| | | 
| | | Then you fall through to the considerably more complicated rules
| | | governing the meaning of a "session" in Robert's.  The language
| | | I'm suggesting merely makes explicit the simple rule governing the
| | | easy case: if the meeting adjourns to the business day immediately
| | | following, you're still in the same session.  The case where other
| | | business days intervene is much harder, but it's all covered in
| | | Robert's.
| | 
| | Where?  pp. 82-89 do not appear to be more specfic than that 
| | a session is a meeting or series of connected meetings (p. 83 top).
| 
| I was working from section 63 of RROR, which (since it's online) I
| can quote here.  I have a little more to say at the end.

This is an interesting excerpt, but it's not from the normative
text, in which I can't find this language.  And I don't see
where it matters whether business days intervene; what's
significant is how you adjourn.

So it doesn't appear that we have to rest anything on the concept of
"business day" in defining what constitutes continuation of a
session, either by the excerpted text or the normative one.  (We
may need to address the issue wrt how long a ballot remains
open.)

| The intended effect of the proposed language making a meeting
| over several successive days a single session was to make it
| unnecessary for a TC to distinguish levels of adjournment in the
| simple case.  Does this not work?  

It just confuses things, to me.  The proposed language,

|   TC meetings carried out over a sequence of
|   business days that follow one another in immediate succession
|   are considered to be part of the same session.

fails to account for the fact that if the meetings were adjourned sine
die they would not, per R, be part of the same session.  And that
could happen.  It would be better to advise committees intending
to make their meetings part of a single session that they should
adjourn to a specified time (and also advise them of the reasons
why it might matter to them whether they were continuing a
session or not.)

regards, Terry