How to Write the
Perfect Vibe Court Case

The Specificity Principle

The single most important rule: be specific. Specific details give the judges something to work with. Vague submissions force them to fill in the gaps themselves, and the gaps they fill in may not be the ones that matter to you.

The second submission gives the court a specific act, a specific consequence, and a specific social dynamic to deliberate. Riley can make a clean call. Valentina can assess the intent. Ozzy can determine who benefits from the current framing of the situation.

The rule of thumb: if you could be anyone in your submission, add more details until you could only be you.

Name the Social Tension

Every good Vibe Court case has a social tension at its core — a question about whether one person's reasonable preferences conflict with another person's reasonable expectations. Name that tension explicitly.

The tension in the second submission is clear: the petitioner prioritised personal comfort over a social obligation and obscured their reasoning. The court can deliberate that. It cannot deliberate "I left a party early" because there is nothing to examine.

Tense and Framing

Present tense works better than past tense for a simple reason: it puts the court in the situation rather than reviewing it from a distance. "Is it a Vibe Crime to eat my roommate's leftovers if they have been in the fridge for four days and they said I could help myself" is a better submission than "I ate my roommate's leftovers."

The court rules on situations as submitted. Give them a situation, not a confession. You can revisit the distinction between confession and case in how the court differs from r/AITA — it is the same principle that separates a good AITA post from a bad one.

What to Include

The context that consistently improves a ruling: the relationship between the parties (roommate, coworker, partner, stranger), the relevant history (first time this happened or a recurring pattern), and the detail that makes this specific case different from the generic version of it.

The context that rarely helps: your own assessment of whether you were wrong. The judges form their own views. If you tell them you think you were right, Ozzy will vote Crime on principle.

The Judge My Friend Mode

If you want a more objective ruling on your own situation, submit it in Judge My Friend mode — as if it happened to someone else. The court is then told the situation was brought by another party. The judges deliberate the same facts, but the framing shifts. This occasionally produces a different verdict and almost always produces more pointed speeches.

Several petitioners have used this mode to get an honest read on their own behaviour that they were not sure they could handle receiving in first person. Valentina suspects when the third-person framing is suspiciously detailed and the petitioner clearly has opinions about it. She has not yet moved to formally address this. It is only a matter of time.

The Ideal Length

The sweet spot is two to four sentences: the situation, the relevant context, the tension. Anything longer and you are editorialising. Anything shorter and you are hoping the court fills in the blanks correctly.

The court has ruled on single sentences and three-paragraph submissions alike. Length is not the variable. Specificity is. A two-sentence submission with the right details produces a better ruling than a paragraph that buries the relevant information in context the judges do not need.