So I think the answer SHOULD be "no", because that is handled by url.parse.  That said, because restify seems to be fairly intolerant of special characters in urls (including many characters considered ok by both express and node's url functions), there actually are still cases where special characters get through.  This is the case for badge slugs as well as the email here.  There's an issue open for this problem here: https://github.com/mozilla/openbadges-badgekit/issues/353