The NESFA® By-Laws
and Related Documents

These HTML versions are the official versions released by the NESFA Rules Committee, and have been certified by the Rules Committee to be correct as of their stated dates.

There is an archive of older versions of these files.

Recent proposed changes to the Standing Rules are stored in a pending file, awaiting perfection (a term of art in the rules business) or review before they are folded into the official HTML files.


The NESFA By-Laws

Preface
Article I: Membership
Article II: Meetings of the Membership
Article III: Election of Officers
Article IV: Duties of Officers
Article V: Management
Article VI: Committees
Article VII: The NESFA Fellowship
Article VIII: Discipline
Article IX: Amendments
Article X: Miscellaneous Provisions
Article XI: Boskone


The NESFA Standing Rules
(AKA The NESFA Code)

Preface
Section I: Officers and Committees
Section II: Finances
Section III: Meetings
Section IV: Services
Section V: Miscellaneous
Appendix A: Humorous Motions
 
Rules already in effect but not yet incorporated into the Standing Rules


Related Material

Some Notes on NESFA Constitutional History

The NESFA Articles of Organization and amendments thereto

The NESFA IRS Ruling Letter in HTML and as a PDF

The NESFA IRS Reinstatment Letter (2019) as a PDF

The Somerville Tax Exemption Letter


Linking to the By-Laws and Standing Rules

By intention, every section, sub-section, sub-sub-section, etc. of the By-Laws and Standing Rules can be directly linked to by a URL that (again, by intention) will never change. (If anyone finds a section for which this is not true, please inform the Rules Committee.) This capability is used extensively within the By-Laws and Standing Rules to link related and referred-to sections, but is also available for use from elsewhere (for example, many of the Treasury procedures at /Treasury/ link to the rules underlying them).

The form of these URLs is standardized, so that someone who wishes to link to a section can deduce the correct URL without having to examine its HTML source.


Quoting from the By-Laws and Standing Rules

Whenever possible, please link to the By-Laws and Standing Rules rather than quoting from them – quotes tend to be forgotten when the original text is updated, and so all too frequently end up outdated. If you must quote (for instance, when writing a procedure to be followed in detail, where following a link to get some bit of information would break up the flow), please also link to the [sub]section quoted and inform the Rules Committee of what you've done. This will allow us to add to the annotation for that [sub]section a "quoted in" link back to your page, so we can ensure that it is updated if the underlying rule is changed. A link adjacent to your quote both is useful to anyone who wants to check the details of the underlying rule and makes it likely that the Rules Committee will eventually discover your quote even if you forget to tell us about it.


"Boskone" is a service mark of the New England Science Fiction Association, Inc.
Comments about this web page: rules-committee@lists.nesfa.org; Questions about NESFA: info@nesfa.org.