council

# Council Council is an optional judgment strategy, not a lifecycle or delivery gate. Use it when one fresh validator is insufficient for a named irreversible, high-blast-radius, or genuinely contested decision. Do not convene a council for a routine or reversible decision that a single fresh validator can settle: the cost of independent contexts needs a named consequential uncertainty. 1. Freeze one question, acceptance surface, evidence set, and subject digest. 2. Give each judge an independent context and the same bounded packet. 3. Require each judge to cite evidence, disclose omissions, and return its own judgment without seeing other answers first. 4. Synthesize agreement and disagreement without majority laundering. Preserve minority evidence and unresolved assumptions. 5. Write `council-report.v1` and return it to the caller. ## A caller may select council on a judge split When the fresh judge and the cross-family judge disagree and the disagreement survives repair, the split is the orchestrator's decision, made in the open and recorded in the report. A caller who wants more reads before deciding may select council on that split alone. Council is that caller's choice, never a step the traversal takes on its own. A selected outer goal's single HOLD helper is bounded causal advice, not permission to convene more votes or substitute for required fresh validation. An exhausted allowance or cancellation skips that helper; an unhelpful consultation does not author...