The legal framework had developed slowly, as these things do. The premise was simple: if past selves were genuine participants in the deliberative process, with recognized standing to vote, then consistent systematic override of a minority voice constituted a failure of that process. A committee in which one member had voted no for thirty years without a single reversal was not a deliberative body; it was a majority with a dissenter who had been given a chair and then ignored.
Prev had been making this argument for nine years. She had won three cases. The cases she won had the same shape: documented override across fifteen or more years, no recorded instance of the minority position influencing the final outcome, and a current holder who could not articulate why the past self's objections had been considered rather than simply outvoted.
The current case: a client's past self, age fourteen, had been a committee member for thirty years and had voted no on every major decision in that period. Thirty years of no. Prev had the records going back to the first formal vote, when the client was twenty. The column marked DISSENT ran unbroken to the present.
The counterargument she anticipated: a past self that votes no on everything may be constitutively misaligned with the current holder. Not injustice, but change. People diverge from who they were; that's the nature of living. A past self that refuses to update is not a victim; it is simply an artifact of a former state.
Prev's answer to this argument was prepared. The question is not whether the past self is wrong. The question is whether it was heard. A vote that is consistently overridden without deliberation is not a vote; it is a formality that masks a decision that was made before the committee convened.
She saved the brief and submitted it.
Then she opened her own roster. She had a committee of six. She scrolled to the entry for age seventeen.
She looked at the column marked DISSENT. It ran down the page in an unbroken line. Twenty-seven years.