Justice SLOs: targets, budgets, and breach actions

Standard intent

A justice service-level objective (justice SLO) is a target for how a system treats the people it decides about: how fast it stops a harm, how fast it reverses one, how often a challenge is upheld. This standard requires every justice SLO to carry an explicit target, budget, or ceiling, and a breach action. Without them, the objective is a word in a report. With them, missing it obliges someone to act.

Required fields for every justice SLO

Each justice SLO must record these six fields, so anyone can tell in advance what counts as a breach and what follows one.

Metric

The justice metric the objective covers: time to restore, time to halt, appeal passage rate, user burden ratio, or irreversibility index.

Target, budget, or ceiling

The numeric threshold, set for each harm class or workflow class.

Measurement window

The window and the statistic, for example weekly p95 or rolling 30-day p99.

Breach action

What happens when the threshold is missed: a safe pause, a circuit breaker, a rollback lane, or added staff.

Owner

The named person accountable for the objective, who can halt the workflow or order the remedy.

Public surface

Where the public can see the metric, any breach, and what was done about it.

Required metric coverage

Every consequential workflow class must publish a target, budget, or ceiling for each of these five metrics.

Breach actions

Breach actions must be defined in advance, rehearsed, and executed immediately when thresholds are missed.

Ownership and public surface

Each justice SLO must name an accountable owner with authority to halt the workflow, roll it back, or staff the remedy. The public surface must show how long the process takes and link to the decision records, so the people it decides about can check that a breach action happened.