A Unified Law Code

[Kaiser B'caw I]

As part of the ongoing discussions about reform of the government, I think I'd like to bring up the matter of the Lawbook and Decreebook.

I have to say that, personally, I've always been a bit uneasy about the fact that Imperial law was separated into two chunks. It means you have to check two separate documents to figure out if something's illegal; because both documents are wikified, it should in principle be easy to cross-reference them, but this was never really done, and even if it were it would still be an extra complication.

The relationship between the Kaiser and the Landsraad nonetheless gave the arrangement a certain worth, since Decrees have been a higher law than laws passed by the Landsraad. But it occurs to me, even if the relationship between the Landsraad and the Kaiser did not change much, that there are ways of achieving this without resorting to two separate documents. After all, if a Kaiser decrees something into law and does not wish the Landsraad to be able to change it, zie can simply veto any law that tries to do so.

In addition, if the decentralizing trends in the reformation bear out, it seems likely that the scope of imperial law will be reduced as the subdivisions take up more of the everyday lawmaking. In such a situation, having two separate law codes may not be feasible.

Therefore, something I intend to see through is the unification of Imperial law into one document, which would be the result both of acts of the Landsraad and decrees of the Kaiser. As a first step, I will be attempting to compile the present contents together into a vaguely-coherent whole. (As a formal name, I think the "Imperial Code of Law" would be nice, but "Lawbook" could remain a convenient shorthand for it.) Once that is done and we can see the state of our laws more clearly, we can decide whether it can stand and be edited from where it is, or if it should be thrown out and a new one started.

[Jacobus Loki]

The wisdom of the Kaiser is only surpassed by the spiciness of his chicken!

[Jonas]

This actually sounds good.

[Jacobus Loki]

It is! Here, have a drumstick!

[Jonas]

[Erik Mortis]

If you can make them compatible somehow.. it might work. Otherwise we have the issue of laws that make no sense being in the hands of the Landsraad.

[Kaiser B'caw I]

Well, some editing may be required to be sure it all fits. I'm trying to keep track of all the changes as I go.

[Malliki Tosha]

Good step in a rightish direction. The Landsraad needs to be declared competent and not always be seen as a bunch of inactive hacks.

[Kaiser B'caw I]

Thankee.

I'm putting the work into a public scratchpad on the wiki; the formatting is still ongoing. The source texts were the copies of the Lawbook and Decreebook on the wiki as of last night.

These are the significant changes I did, at least the ones I can remember doing:
-General standardization of numbering/lettering scheme
-General spelling corrections
-Article titles
-Modification of I.B.1 to be more explicit
-Addition of I.B.2 on the purpose of the Lawbook
-Merging of LB and DB chapters on the Kaiser into Chapter II
-Merging of LB and DB chapters on the Ministries into Chapter IV, including addition of definitions
-Merging of LB and DB chapters on land and subdivisions into Chapter VII, with minor rearrangement
-Merging of LB and DB chapters on honors into Chapter XI, with considerable rearrangement and alterations to reflect who is responsible for awards

A lot of the rest existed only in one document or the other, and could be put in wholesale. There was a lot less overlap than I expected, to be honest.

This is only a starting point for changes and parings-down. I'll be suggesting some of those in the near future, but the FIRST thing, the absolute first thing, that I notice is this: the Lawbook, at the very least, has not been consistently updated. The change to the Palatine titles that happened a while back is not there, and a few other things that I seem to recall getting passed aren't either. I'm not terribly concerned about them as specific issues now, because I expect that future overhauls will rewrite a lot of it anyway, but it does mean that in the future someone's going to have to be a lot more rigorous about updating the law.

edit: Also, as part of the Chapter VII merge, I renamed Territories to Dominions, to avoid potential confusion with the section on Shirerithian territory. This is another one of those things I suspect will become obsolete, but nonetheless...

[Erik Mortis]

Anything that passed in my tenue as Praetor is in there. Check the edit log. I put the name of the bill in the description for easy checking.

[Jonas]

That's quite impressive.

[Erik Mortis]

What you call an Article, we have normally called, Sub-Sections, thus them not having names.

[Kaiser B'caw I]

Thanks for the updates, Erik.

I can return those portions to being called subsections; I'd seen both that name and "article" used, so I'd just sort of picked one. As for the titles, some of the subsections had something like them already, and I put in the rest as aids for me; it makes it a bit easier to see at a glance, in the wikipage's table of contents, where something is.

[Erik Mortis]

No issue there.

[Kaiser B'caw I]

he Lawbook changes that Erik posted have now been incorporated into the scratchpad version of the Code of Law.

Thoughts so far, from a pragmatic-decentralizing viewpoint:

-Chapter I: Could use some rearrangements. I'm thinking the removal of "one time events", since Imperial Orders do basically the same thing. Also, separating out legal statements from nonlegal ones and making note of Landsraad equivalents of the Kaiser's options: that is, Kaiser has Decrees, Landsraad has bills/law/statutes/acts/whatever, which modify the new Lawbook; Kaiser has Imperial Orders, Landsraad has (insert name here), which have legal effect but involve a specific incident or otherwise are nonpermanent; Kaiser has Proclamations, Landsraad has Resolutions, for nonlegal statements. Maybe also make a note of Ministry policy being a form of informal law.
-Chapter II: Rewrite portion on line of succession to remove references to Houses. This will probably require some rethinking, since the subdivisions won’t behave in the same way Houses did. Maybe a set rotation system? Each time a Kaiser declares no heir, a subdivision gets its turn at providing one?
-Chapter III: If the feudal system is made to be a matter of voluntary adoption by subdivisions, rather than an assumption about how things work, this chapter may need serious consideration. The question of noble ranks and their meaning may be reclassified as internal affairs of the subdivisions. Another possibility is to make the feudal system a sort of official option, but even then should probably exist as a separate set of guidelines rather than be in the lawbook.
-Chapter V: Devolution of powers to the subdivisions will probably include responsibility for judicial affairs and procedures relating to cases entirely within respective subdivisions. In this case, this article would probably be rewritten to account just for the judicial apparatus of the Imperial Government.
-Chapter VI: Section D can probably be reduced or rewritten. The portion about dethroning nobles wouldn't apply to non-feudal subdivisions (or it can be generalized and merged with the other portion).
-Chapter VII: This’ll be a biggie, both in the amount of change that’s likely to be needed and in the importance of deciding which way the changes go. I’m going to be needing considerable input from others about what they’d like to see, but here are my suggestions, (I am assuming for these that Elwynn has been successfully reincorporated):
--Sections A and B: Section A is largely a relic of the pre-House era that was never updated. With the abolition of the Houses, that’s not necessarily a bad thing; but A.3 will need to be examined. As it is (accounting for terminology changes), it means that, by and large, subdivisions are going to be responsible for counties in their territory. How many there are, what their borders are, even whether they exist... so long as subdivisional and national borders aren’t affected, they’ll be able to do it. If this is kept, we have to be sure that that’s what we want; if not, we’ll have to figure out wha the limits are, and who should be responsible for approving such things (I’d think the Landsraad). Also, A.3 conflicts with B.1 as to whose responsibility it is to notify the MCS of changes. Although I admit to a certain conflict of interest here, I’d suggest submitting claimsmap changes to DirCart, just so we can coordinate fewer major updates rather than lots of little minor ones. I’d rather not annoy the MCS (that much).
--Section C: Nothing vital here to change, although I don’t know how necessary it is to have Shirekeep city government enshrined in law.
--Sections D through H: As far as the Code of Law is concerned, the changes to these sections are going to be the meat of land-related reform, and of the dismantlement of the House system. They’re also going to be where details are most in flux. What I’m leaning towards at the moment, which I've indicated elsewhere, is this:
1) From the first, divide Shireroth up into land-based subdivisions, equivalent to the old Duchies. The ones that want to should be able once again call themselves Duchies and keep up the nobility, but since not all subdivisions may choose to do this, we might want a more neutral term to use throughout the Lawbook. We could borrow “Shire” for this purpose, since it resonates well with the country’s name and is already in use in Section H. There will be between three and five of these subdivisions, depending: at the very least, the active subdivisions of Brookshire, Kildare, and Elwynn (since I suspect Elwynn would want their old name back), and possibly Goldshire/Goldenmoon and/or Yardistan.
2) Defining the borders of each subdivision, and how many there are, will depend on how we want to handle land allocation. My inclination is that we keep the active ones more or less at their traditional size, and permit either or both of Goldshire and Yardistan to be in a sort of officially inactive state, what Erik elsewhere called "Shadow Duchies". The active subdivisions would have control of their internal counties and would be responsible for granting and revoking them, but the Shadow Duchies would be subdivisions-in-waiting; until one accumulated enough willing citizens within its boundaries to be considered active, it and its component counties would be under the aegis of the Imperial Government. People would be allowed to settle counties in the Shadow Duchies (or to remain in them if already there), but if there were not enough of them, or not enough agreement, to allow them to become active subdivisions, they should have alternatives available to them if they so wish. I have elsewhere proposed two...
4) On the one hand, an individual in the Shadow Duchies could choose to align zirself with an active subdivision, and be counted toward its population and activity. I'm not sure whether this should be allowed to count toward minimum requirements; i.e., if a Duchy required a minimum of three citizens, and wound up with two within the proper borders and one from outside aligning with them, would the Duchy meet requirements, or would it need to get someone else living within the proper borders?
5) They could also choose to align with each other, in what I will call for the moment Shadow Baronies. These would have lesser requirements than standard subdivisions; basically they would be alliances of otherwise unaligned-but-active individuals and their counties. Their counties would not have to be located particularly near each other, they would have no population requirements other than "more than one". On the other hand, if all members of a Shadow Barony were not within one Shadow Duchy, they might not be able to activate that Duchy if they wished (see also the issue about requirements as relates to alignment above). Shadow Baronies should probably also, if they receive Landsraad representation, get less than active subdivisions, though the form of that will depend on how Landsraad votes are allotted.
--Section I: No particular arguments here.
--Section J: Not vital, although I think the idea of "sectors", at least in the sense that originally spawned this part, is nowadays outdated enough that it's not particularly necessary to actively discourage it.
--Section K: If the subdivisions are going to get increased autonomy, it may be more economical to do away with this portion as a special category. Ideally, newly annexed nations should be able to get along as just standard subdivisions, so long as they're willing to provide whatever requirements are needed to interact with the Imperial Government. Work will be needed on a Great Convention to be more sure how this would go.
--Section L: Can probably be kept as is.

...I think that's it for now. Discuss and tear apart; I'll start looking through the other chapters tomorrow.

[Jonas]

We shouldn't forget these stuff while introducing reforms.

[Kaiser Ometeotl I]

No.. we shouldn't.

Now that we got a government running again, we can start putting this stuff to vote.

[Jonas]

Perhaps we should move this to the Frontgate? As it needs debate, and more importantly: updates.

[Kaiser Ometeotl I]

I'd suggest posting them up as separate ideas. I think some also already got implemented.

[Jonas]

Hhmm. Yes, no problem at all.