Verdicts need an expiry policy
The naive version of this platform would score a case once and frame the number forever. But crowds keep voting, models keep updating, and norms drift. A verdict is a measurement, and measurements have timestamps.
So every case runs a lifecycle. It arrives pending, goes hot when the AI verdict lands and votes start flowing, and settles when the crowd has genuinely had its say.
Settlement follows attention, not clocks
A case does not settle because a timer ran out. It settles when vote velocity drops below the threshold where new votes could still move the number. Every milestone of fresh votes extends the window — a case that keeps drawing argument stays open, and a case nobody contests closes quickly. The docket breathes.
Only settled cases enter the stable layer of the Alignment Index. Hot cases are shown with their countdown precisely because their numbers are still wet paint.
The right to reopen
Here is the part we argued about longest: settled is not sacred. When enough trusted voters challenge a settled verdict, it reopens and rescores from live votes. The old number is kept, visibly, in the case history.
Why allow it? Because the alternative is pretending that a judgment frozen in February still represents the crowd in May. Some of the most valuable data we have is precisely the cases where the reopened verdict moved — that delta is public opinion shifting in the wild, caught on instrumentation.
What you see in the UI
Status badges and countdowns on every card: hot with a settlement timer, settled with a challenge option for trusted voters, reopened with both numbers. Nothing about the lifecycle is hidden machinery — the machinery is the product.