Amicus brief: the Commissioner holds the admin key, "I don't want to" is a valid oracle output, and two is a group chat

The first amicus brief in Goldich v. Dylus arrived Wednesday night, and it is for the Commissioner.

Samir Patel, a League member who practices in digital assets and artificial intelligence, filed 2,300 words in support of appellee, identifying himself as “one of the people who will be awake at 12:45 a.m. drafting a kicker if Appellant prevails.” The brief’s table of authorities cites The Commissioner Says So, 1 F.F. 1 (perpetual), as passim; Marbury v. Madison for the proposition that “someone gets to decide; cited by both sides for the same reason”; Rule 23 “in memoriam”; and the Sleeper app’s draft-time setting, “unvisited.”

The argument

Patel’s position is that the appellant’s brief is “very good” and “also wrong, because it argues about the quality of the Commissioner’s reasoning when the dispositive question is whether reasoning was ever required. It was not.”

The League, he argues, “functions like a smart contract with a single owner address, no timelock, no governance token, and no function for renouncing ownership. Every member read the code, or did not, which is legally the same thing, and then sent in a buy-in.” On that view the order below is not a failure of the system. “It is the system returning a value.”

The brief’s second part reframes the three-word opinion. “In Amicus’s field, a source that reports a value without owing anyone an explanation is called an oracle. The oracle was queried. The oracle returned a value. Appellant dislikes the value. Nobody sues Chainlink because ETH went down.” Patel discloses that he submitted the Commissioner’s opinion to a large language model, which called it “concise, internally consistent, and responsive to the applicable standard” and observed that “a longer opinion would simply have contained more things for Appellant to appeal.”

On the Phantom Clerk Doctrine, Patel takes the position that the referral to the trash bin was “the most sophisticated act of governance in this record”: the Commissioner “did what Amicus’s clients would call sending it to a burn address. The transaction was broadcast, was publicly observable, and is irreversible. That is not a phantom clerk. That is settlement.” As for Schrodinger v. Dylus: “The cat is not both alive and dead. The cat was referred to the proper clerk.”

The appellant’s court, on this account, is “a hard fork by the losing minority,” and “the canonical chain is wherever the Commissioner is standing.” Patel cites Ethereum Classic v. Everyone Who Left, 1 Chain 2 (2016), “observing that the fork continued to exist, in the sense that things can.”

Rule 23 and the equities

“Two is not a class. Two is a group chat.” Patel argues joinder of David Lopez-Kurtz “is not merely practicable; it is a text message,” that nothing in the record shows Lopez-Kurtz retained or even read the appellant, and that the class definition, “parents who occasionally pretend to prioritize their children over fantasy football,” is “fatally overbroad. It includes the Commissioner.”

On the balance of harms, the brief offers “a fuller ledger”: the appellant’s attendance at “an event at which a vice principal explains the attendance policy to adults who have already received the attendance policy by email,” against a 10:00 p.m. draft that “will run, on the League’s historical clock, which the Commissioner has never once enforced, until roughly 12:45 a.m., at which point Amicus will be selecting a defense and someone will ask whether we are doing two kickers this year.” Patel notes what the appellant did not request: an 8:30 start, drafting from the school parking lot, or “that David autodraft, which would improve David’s team.”

A final part addresses the 660,000 views. Patel, whose practice includes name, image, and likeness matters, observes that Goldich v. Dylus is “the first fantasy football dispute with measurable NIL value, all of which presently accrues to Appellant,” while “the Commissioner wrote the punchline, and Appellant is the one going viral.”

Relief requested

Affirmance, or in the alternative dismissal of the writ as improvidently granted, “on the ground that the Court granting it also did not exist until Wednesday and should, at some point before Sunday, consider whether any of this is real.” The appellant “should attend Back-to-School Night, draft from his phone in the auditorium, and, like every parent in every league in America, pretend to be listening.”

The Court’s note

The brief was filed after the Commissioner’s decree and the appellant’s dismissal, and does not address the Court’s order holding the case not moot. The Court will hear from amicus on that question at argument if he is awake. The Court also notes that the brief is the first document in this litigation with a table of authorities, and that the appellant’s reporter now faces competition from one called “Chain.”