Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke Bunyip
It's potentially a good system for nomadic folk, or a society which has disparate nomadic and settled aspects.
It could even have a court of appeal, where if one of the judges is in dispute with the others, a case could be reheard with a panel of five, one from each party, and three neutrals. Would require a societal reverence for jurisprudence and the actual practice of law, but.
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Such a society might be highly buttressed by kinship, gerontocracy, and religion. Like Jews or Armenians or Roma. The reverence for law is in part the reverence for the patriarch. Though Jews have long been famed for reverence for law in the abstract anyway.
Joint trials of the kind took place along the Scottish Border. If things were REASONABLY peaceful (meaning the respective monarchs were not laying waste to everything over petty geneological and real estate disputes even if the clans were still robbing each other merrily) then the officials from the English and Scottish side would meet regularly. In the course of the meeting there was a series of trials with a jury of six English and six Scots.