PROTOCOL IS CONTRACT
All verdicts conform to the schema defined in the Build Guide. No special-casing. The protocol may evolve through formal amendment, but until amended, every council writes to the same schema.
Unmaintainability — each new council becomes a special case, the schema cracks into 47 dialects
Without protocol discipline, every new council becomes a special case. The schema cracks into 47 dialects, integration becomes impossible, and the institution becomes unmaintainable. Year 10 is dramatically worse than Year 1 if the protocol has been quietly forked 47 times.
The verdict schema lives at Modus/Councils/Verdicts/_schema.json. The validator at _validator.py checks every verdict against it. Every council's output flows through the schema. The dashboard reads from this layer. The Cowork Surfacing Skill reads from this layer. Schema is genuinely the contract.
Protocol amendments require Constitutional approval with explicit schema migration plan — what fields change, how existing verdicts are handled, who validates the migration. The protocol is rigid by default and elastic only through deliberate amendment.
New councils sometimes have novel verdict types. The schema has a type enum that can be extended. Adding a new type is an amendment to Law III. The Sovereign can approve type extensions without a full constitutional rewrite — but the request goes through Constitutional, not directly to the schema file.
Examples of what would violate Law III: a council writing verdicts with custom field names that don't appear in the schema. A council using an undocumented verdict type. A council outputting in markdown instead of JSON. Any pattern where the schema is treated as advisory rather than as the contract.
Constitutional laws are not values — they are failure-mode insurance. Law III insures specifically against unmaintainability. Without it, the Borg eventually fails through this specific mode regardless of how good the founder's intentions are.