Fencing notes:Changing The Rules

Board and Committee approval of rules - January 2023

Our mundane organisations (SCA Ltd Australia and SCA NZ Inc) hold legal liability when things go wrong in a real-world sense. Our insurance policies are based off what our insurers know of our risks, and a lot of that information is found in the rule books that we use, so we can’t just make changes without the approvals of our Board and Committee once they’ve have a chat to the insurers.

The new process is:

• Proposed rule changes and experiments are formally submitted to the Board and Committee (and Crown and Kingdom Seneschal) on the 30th of the month. This allows time for them to be sent to our insurers to review, and for discussion ahead of the Board and Committee meetings.
• If the changes or proposed experiment are acceptable, they are approved at the meetings in the second week of the month - this may take longer if the insurance companies need more time.
• The changes are written into the rule books, announced in court, distributed to marshals, and are in effect when they are included in the next publication of Pegasus, which might be a special edition if we need one.

This includes changes that occur to all of the martial rules at Society level!

We need to begin the change process as soon a rule change is made to Society rules, but they won't come into effect in Lochac until they have gone through our local approval process. They might not come into effect at all in Lochac if they don’t fit our legal or insurance environment, or we want to keep more restrictive rules because of local safety issues. We may need to get an exemption from the Society Marshal.

Just because it's in the Society rules, doesn't mean you can automatically do that here. Our organisations’ policies outrank Corpora.

Because of this, we have changed one of the Rules of the Lists, so the Sovereign (the one who won Crown Tourney) may no longer waive any standards that Lochac has that are additional to Society rules. “But the King said,” wasn’t going to go well with the Coroner. This was later updated in Corpora.

Experimentation - 1 January 2024

Experiments may create liaibility issues, which rest with our Board and Committee, so they need to consent to accept that risk. Our insurance company may not cover us for any activity that we have not provided full disclosure of, so they also need to approve any experiements in the same way that actual rule changes are approved.