Right to Approach the Ruler and Request Judgment

The Right to Approach the Ruler and Request Judgment is the principle that even the lowliest person may address a sovereign directly and demand judgment, without having to pass through an intermediary. In the novel’s account of political access, its survival as law contrasts sharply with the layers of officials that make such access practically impossible: a right can remain formally intact while the institutions around it prevent its exercise.

The Principle and Its Earlier Practice

In an earlier, simpler political order, a prime duty of a Terran sovereign was to make himself publicly available on frequent occasions. Anyone, whatever his station, could come before him directly and request a judgment. The principle described more than a privilege of petition; it placed personal availability among the sovereign’s responsibilities and offered a route around the ordinary hierarchy.

Traces of this practice persisted even as kings became scarce and politically powerless. The right of an Englishman to “Cry Harold!” remained as a legal and cultural residue, although few people knew of it and none exercised it. In the twentieth century, successful city political bosses preserved a practical echo of the custom by keeping their office doors open and hearing from anyone who came in, including gandy dancers and bindlestiffs.

Survival in Law

The right was never formally abolished. Its principle remained embedded in Articles I and IX of the Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America, making it nominal law for many humans even after the Articles of World Federation had almost superseded that constitutional document in actual practice. Legal survival therefore did not mean that ordinary people could readily use the right: the old principle endured on paper while political structures changed around it.

The Flapper System as an Obstacle

By the time the Federation ship Champion returned from Mars, the flapper system had been expanding for more than a century and had become highly intricate. Many people were employed solely to carry out its rituals. A public figure’s importance could be judged by the number of intermediaries separating him from ordinary people: executive assistants, private secretaries, secretaries to private secretaries, press secretaries, receptionists, and appointment clerks, among others.

The titles varied, and some powerful intermediaries had no title at all, but their function was the same. Each could exercise an arbitrary veto over communication from the outside world to the Great Man who nominally stood above them. The system thus inverted the older expectation of sovereign availability. Instead of the petitioner approaching the ruler, access depended on a chain of gatekeepers, each able to block the attempt before it reached its intended recipient.

Political Significance

The contrast between the right and the flapper system is a contrast between formal access and effective access. The constitutional principle remained available as nominal law, but a dense administrative apparatus could make direct appeal unreachable in practice. The account presents the system not as a single prohibition but as a multiplication of intermediaries, so that obstruction becomes routine and distributed across the institutions surrounding a public figure.

The right matters as a surviving counter-principle: it preserves the expectation that a person may seek judgment from the sovereign without permission from those who manage the sovereign’s attention. Its continued legal existence exposes the gap between a political order’s stated protections and the channels through which people can actually make themselves heard.