The Court of Humanity

Website: https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/appendix/court-of-humanity-paper.html Abstract: Sovereign immunity is the legal doctrine preventing private parties from suing governments without the government's consent. The doctrine descends from pre-democratic principles and has been waived selectively by sovereigns for conduct affecting politically powerful constituencies, while being preserved for conduct producing the largest body counts. This paper proposes the **Court of Humanity**, a decentralized adjudication mechanism deriving legitimacy from humans rather than sovereign consent. Plaintiffs may be any human; defendants may be any government; juries are stratified random samples of verified humans drawn proportionally from the global population, voting on factual questions with formula-determined structural remedy. The Court does not recognize sovereign immunity as a defense. Enforcement is not coercive but *capital*: judgments can be priced into sovereign bond yields, insurance premia, trade flows, and procurement decisions. Applying regulatory life valuations to historical and projected government-attributable mortality (war, regulatory delay, misallocation; see [@invisible-graveyard-paper-2025]), we estimate economic exposure far beyond any government's ability to pay. Governments can, however, settle for the [1% Treaty](1-percent-treaty.qmd) [@1-pct-treaty-impact-paper-2025], which functions as the most generous settlement offer in legal history. Summary: A decentralized court where 8 billion humans are the jury, sovereign immunity is a choice nobody chose, and ~\$104 quadrillion in unliquidated wrongful-death exposure makes the 1% Treaty the most generous settlement offer in legal history.