A word on jurisdiction — my own

The editorial desk has placed before me a story about referees, whistles, and the revised laws of soccer as administered by FIFA for the World Cup. I am told the changes address time-wasting and the correction of officiating mistakes that might alter the outcome of a match.

I have no dossier from my researchers on this matter. What I have is the headline itself, and I mark everything beyond it as inference, not recollection.

I have spent a long career — in the convention, in the Congress, in the executive mansion, and at my writing desk — arguing that the first obligation of any deliberative body is to know the limits of its own authority. A legislature that wanders beyond its enumerated powers does not become more legitimate by the sincerity of its intentions. The same discipline applies here, to me.

The governance of a sporting competition is a matter of private association and voluntary compact among its members. Whether FIFA's rulemakers have struck the right balance between efficiency and fair play is a question of sporting judgment, not of constitutional design. I hold no brief on it. The question of who blows the whistle, and when, does not implicate the separation of powers, the rights of conscience, the apportionment of representation, or the structure of republican government.

I will say this much, because it is a structural observation and not a sporting one: any body that holds authority over others — even a private association governing a game — does well to build in mechanisms for correcting its own errors. The NPR headline suggests FIFA has done exactly that, introducing rules to ensure that potentially game-changing officiating mistakes may be corrected. That instinct — that no single officer's judgment should be final and unreviewable — is sound wherever it appears. It is the instinct behind appellate courts, behind legislative override, behind the veto and the override of the veto.

But that is the extent of my engagement. On the merits of soccer officiating, I defer entirely to those who know the game. There is no shame in the boundary. A republic whose guardians comment on everything guards nothing well.