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Old 03-03-2018, 12:11 AM   #151
jason taylor
 
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Default Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems

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Originally Posted by Daigoro View Post
I was tickled by the idea of government by judges (without going Megacity One) for some recent world-building game, but I couldn't wrap my head around who would be creating the legislation for the judges to judge on.
The rabbinical system was like this with the rabbinical institution not only teaching but providing judges and even running "foreign policy", that is negotiating with gentile princes who happened to rule the area a given community had plopped down in. Of course we all know the source of that legislation but analyzing the claim is beyond the scope of the thread.

On the other hand if you are going to make a rule of judges like this it might end up having transcendental claims of a similar nature. Come to think of it, "Law" used to etymologically mean, "Things that are settled."
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Old 03-03-2018, 01:34 AM   #152
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Default Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems

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The rabbinical system was like this with the rabbinical institution not only teaching but providing judges and even running "foreign policy", that is negotiating with gentile princes who happened to rule the area a given community had plopped down in.
Does that mean the judges were the supreme authority though? Or subject to the authority of the rabbinical institution?

By the by, it was for (E)'s military sci-fi setting thread, and I was looking at a kritarchy as the system of government for an isolated space station, but didn't get much further than that.

I guess you'd need some established book or body of law that the ruling judges dispassionately govern from. Or perhaps some philosophy of "natural law" that everyone implicitly accepts.
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Old 03-03-2018, 05:46 AM   #153
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I guess you'd need some established book or body of law that the ruling judges dispassionately govern from. Or perhaps some philosophy of "natural law" that everyone implicitly accepts.
Which frankly is not all that rare. Most societies don't really *need* new laws on a regular basis. Even in the modern world, where we think you need laws and regulations for everything, and there are a lot of other kinds of change to generate new situations that might even genuinely need some, many laws are fairly old, or closely modeled on an old one it "replaced".

Believing you need new laws every year is historically a weird outlier.
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Old 03-03-2018, 06:51 PM   #154
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Default Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems

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Which frankly is not all that rare. Most societies don't really *need* new laws on a regular basis. Even in the modern world, where we think you need laws and regulations for everything, and there are a lot of other kinds of change to generate new situations that might even genuinely need some, many laws are fairly old, or closely modeled on an old one it "replaced".

Believing you need new laws every year is historically a weird outlier.
While I might agree with you from a philosophical point of view, note that most real societies add new laws at a rate that is too fast for any reasonable person to follow the rate and that the complexity of the actual legal system quickly outstrips the ability of any realistic person to follow it.

In other words, no matter how little complexity people might prefer, the reality is that voters and their servitors, given the chance, tend to fiddle with the existing rules often enough to make it essentially impossible for a non-expert to know what the current state of the art of Law is at any given time.

A fairly predictable result of this is that any old-fashioned character who imagines that Law and Philosophy (Ethics) or Theology (Preferred Religion) share any kind of framework with Law will quickly be disabused of that entirely false notion by a session or two of witnessing the actual Law skill functioning in the setting.
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Old 03-04-2018, 08:52 AM   #155
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A fairly predictable result of this is that any old-fashioned character who imagines that Law and Philosophy (Ethics) or Theology (Preferred Religion) share any kind of framework with Law will quickly be disabused of that entirely false notion by a session or two of witnessing the actual Law skill functioning in the setting.
That's probably true of "modern" societies (and come to think of it is perhaps closely related to the reason many people don't trust the law much and assume lawyers and politicians are scum even though most of them are at least trying to be decent people), but it's an artifact of that particular kind of government/legal system, not an inevitable or I think even particularly common feature of all possible ones.
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Old 03-04-2018, 09:35 AM   #156
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Default Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems

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A fairly predictable result of this is that any old-fashioned character who imagines that Law and Philosophy (Ethics) or Theology (Preferred Religion) share any kind of framework with Law will quickly be disabused of that entirely false notion by a session or two of witnessing the actual Law skill functioning in the setting.
I'm not sure I follow this part. To witness the actual Law skill actually functioning in the setting would need actual lawyers actually practising actual laws, yet none of these exist outside the bounds of my (and my players') imagination.* So in fact, how we imagine any interaction with the law going will be exactly how it ends up going.

I'm not sure we could prove any notion false by imaginarily engaging with imaginary laws in an imaginary setting. The only thing we'd prove is that we haven't bothered with all the possible legal implications of a particular set of imaginary laws, and are probably more interested in some roughly sketched social and adventure implications of a particular "weird society of the week".


*I may not have actually GMed for... over 2 decades? As such, said players are also in fact imaginary.
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Old 03-04-2018, 11:01 AM   #157
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Default Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems

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I'm not sure I follow this part. To witness the actual Law skill actually functioning in the setting would need actual lawyers actually practising actual laws, yet none of these exist outside the bounds of my (and my players') imagination.* So in fact, how we imagine any interaction with the law going will be exactly how it ends up going.

I'm not sure we could prove any notion false by imaginarily engaging with imaginary laws in an imaginary setting. The only thing we'd prove is that we haven't bothered with all the possible legal implications of a particular set of imaginary laws, and are probably more interested in some roughly sketched social and adventure implications of a particular "weird society of the week".


*I may not have actually GMed for... over 2 decades? As such, said players are also in fact imaginary.
The 'setting' I refer to being the real world.
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Old 03-04-2018, 05:57 PM   #158
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Default Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems

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The 'setting' I refer to being the real world.
Oooh! Who published it?
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Old 03-05-2018, 02:26 AM   #159
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Oooh! Who published it?
Debate over the IP rights is ongoing.
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Old 03-05-2018, 05:13 AM   #160
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That's probably true of "modern" societies (and come to think of it is perhaps closely related to the reason many people don't trust the law much and assume lawyers and politicians are scum even though most of them are at least trying to be decent people), but it's an artifact of that particular kind of government/legal system, not an inevitable or I think even particularly common feature of all possible ones.
Some of the problem is that the world has gotten very complicated and very populous. Large parts of the law govern things the average person will never deal with directly unless they are employed in, or do business in, a specific field -- which parts those are depend on what you do. If you work for a railroad, you need to know the minutia of law governing shipping by rail, signage, signals, etc. -- if you don't and aren't a model railroader, then its mostly irrelevant to you.

The parts that are "public-facing" codify what perhaps once were social custom and unspoken expectation so that I can purchase a good from a company half-the country away via the internet, never speaking to another human being, and have confidence that the good will arrive in a reasonable time, as described, and be not unexpectedly dangerous and the seller can sell/ship a good half-the-country away and have confidence in being paid, and that the good will get there. It really is an amazing system.

Are there weird bits, hold-overs from past eras, pieces that don't fit together , kludges, duct-tape over those kludges, -- yup. But remember that if the problem goes to court it gets adjudicated by people who, for the most part, genuinely want to get a right and fair result. Again, how often they succeed is a matter of debate, but the bulk of the system's actors do want to live up to its aspirations.
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