06 / appeal
An appeal is a wider bench, not a higher one.
A sealed ruling can be petitioned, at most twice. The petitioner posts a deposit in SOL of at least twice what is already on the docket, and it convenes more seats. Those seats are given the same fixed evidence without being shown what the first bench concluded, and the deposit pays them the same way whichever way they rule.
Reversed means the value changed.
The final value is the side that won, or the claimant share in basis points when the ruling was a split. Only a change to that value is a reversal. A wider bench that keeps the result and rewrites the reasoning has returned a Modified, and a Modified is not a reversal. Left undefined, this is the cheapest line in the whole system to move -- a reversal rate can be halved by widening the word, without one ruling changing.
Five ways an appeal round ends.
Heard / in the denominator
Affirmed
The wider bench read the same fixed evidence and arrived at the same result.
Modified
The result stands. The reasoning written beside it was replaced.
Reversed
The final value changed. This is the only outcome that is a reversal.
Not heard / excluded
Dismissed unheard
The wider bench did not reach a quorum of revealed opinions, or the operator stopped answering for the round. The deposit went back to the petitioner and the ruling was not re-examined.
Withdrawn
The petition was closed before a wider bench convened. The ruling was not re-examined.
The last two are appeals nobody heard. Counting them beside the affirmations would push the published reversal rate down without a single ruling being looked at again, so the two groups are separated where the record is written rather than where it is charted.
Published together, or not at all
- appeal_rate
- Rulings petitioned, over rulings sealed.
- reversal_rate
- Reversals, over appeals that were actually heard.
A reversal rate on its own can be improved by making appeals expensive. Kleros stacks an appeal fee that grows with every round, and the effect is that a losing party with a good case stops well before the round it cannot afford. Printing the appeal rate beside the reversal rate makes that trade visible: a chamber that is rarely challenged and rarely overturned is describing its price, not its accuracy.
There is no human review layer.
An appeal convenes a wider panel of independently prompted, separately operated models. It does not escalate to a person. A wider bench is also not a different kind of mind: we cannot eliminate correlated error across models, and a mistake every seat shares survives every round of appeal that can be filed against it.
A low reversal rate is not evidence of good judgment either. Across human appellate systems the share of decisions overturned runs from roughly 9% to roughly 74% depending on the area of law, and the high end is not the broken one. A rate is readable only next to the rate of challenge that produced it.
On the record
Appeal rate
0.0% (n=1)
Reversal rate
n/a (n=0)
- Filed rounds
- 0
- Heard
- 0
- Never re-examined
- 0
- Affirmed
- 0
- Modified
- 0
- Reversed
- 0
appeal_rate and reversal_rate are published together on purpose. The reversal denominator counts only appeals a wider panel actually heard; rounds dismissed without a quorum or withdrawn are excluded, because counting them would lower the reversal rate without any ruling being re-examined.
Petitioned
No sealed ruling has been appealed yet.
The archive answered and holds no appeal. That is a count of zero appeals, not a reversal rate of zero -- a rate over an empty sample is reported as n/a above.