Worldbuilding 202: Law and Order
Greetings and salipiform! ...I am not calling anyone fat, I swear! It is I, your favourite Alien Limax, Vivian Sayan, who is back to tell you more about everything! Welcome Law and Order! Can we solve the crime in under 60 minutes? Probably.
(Anne: In the worldbuilding legal system, lazy worldbuilding offences are considered especially heinous. In this blog, the dedicated worldbuilder who investigates these vicious felonies is a member of an elite squad known as the Special Vivian Unit. These are zhir stories.)
Laws’ infrastructure
Like everything, and as I say in my 15 rules of worldbuilding, nothing exists in a vacuum, and neither do laws! They require infrastructure to really exist, so I will go through that here! But let us start with the most obvious question:
The fuck is a law?
This one is not that difficult:
A law is a rule society has decided on and considers important enough to be enforced by the collective through force if need be.
All groups have rules that they generally enforce; typical punishments are exclusion, being ignored etc. But most groups–the sane ones–don’t feel a huge need to use force to do so. If someone is an ass, you just don’t invite them anymore!
But when a group thinks something is so important that force might be needed to make certain it is followed… it can be considered a law! Not all laws are equal and as forcefully enforced, but we are speaking roughly here.
Who makes them?
Of course, to have laws, some people, or some one, has to make them! The common term today for the body that does it is “legislature,” which I will use throughout the post. One thing to keep in mind is that legislatures here do not need to be a cabinet or voted in. They can be advisors of a king, the collective as a whole, or anything that is accepted by society to have the power to make laws.
I still haven’t answered the question of who makes laws, just given it a name. And the answer is as obvious as it is strange: whoever people accept as a law writer. If people accept that Anne Winchell over there alone has the right to write laws and keep supporting that actively or passively, then Lady Winchell is the one who has the power to write laws.
Jurisdiction
I alluded to this in the previous point, but I will formalise it. But first, what is jurisdiction? Having jurisdiction for a court (or whatever equivalent for law enforcement) means they have the right to rule over it. That is, the laws apply within that area. So how is jurisdiction decided?
Same way, really; you decide who is included in the legislature. People give consent to be ruled by the laws through their acceptance, and wherever people agree, the same laws apply: that is the jurisdiction it has. Now, an individual can disagree as much as they want, but as long as the vast majority agree that they have jurisdiction, you have to deal with the law! So if any sovereign citizens are reading, first, gtfo, second, you are still under the law!
Enforcement
What use are laws if they are not enforced? Nothing! They are completely sodding useless then. In a lot of history, there were no police! Can you imagine that? There were two primary enforcement methods through history: the people themselves on the local level, and the army when it came to the large scale laws. Police as an independent organisation from the military came much later, in the 19th century to be precise.
After who carries out enforcement, the second thing to enforce the law is… Well, what the law says! But wait, what does it say? Yeah, you need a court-like system to interpret the laws. The thing is, it doesn’t need to be like most court systems with a judge, jury, etc. You can skip some parts of these and even have multiple judges. A common system in the old Norse was that for disputes which required judgement, 3 nearby tribe leaders met up, discussed with the parties involved, then the 3 voted on it. Majority win. A triad, so to speak!
After this, of course, comes how you carry out certain punishments. Do you have prisons? Or how do you keep someone under house arrest? What about community service? The executer? Lots of work goes into this! Oh, and fines: who keeps track of fine money? Speaking of!
Penalties
Well, you have to decide what punishment goes where. Most common ones, through history to the present, are
Execution
Torture
Fines
Day fines
Imprisonment
Community Service
Hard Labour
Mutilation
Most of these are self evident, and I won’t bother explaining them. But there are a few I will explain because they are not as well known. Fines are a fixed amount; no matter who you are and what you earn, they are the same across the board. Day fines, however, are different. They are something that scales with one's wealth and earnings. So 5 day fines might be 50 bucks for a poor person but over 50 million for a ludicrously rich person. The term “day fine” comes from a rough estimation of “how much do you make a day?” and then a fraction of that to be the fine so you can survive and live but still feel your gonads being punched economically.
Day fines have the benefit of hitting rich and poor with a similar punch, whereas normal fines generally give the rich a carte blanche to ignore said law since the punishment is nothing to them.
Now, community service and hard labour may be thought of as the same as each other, but they are not. Community service is generally for a short duration, and the person is allowed to go back home, can still work, and so on. It is an addition on top of your ordinary day to day life so you can work off your debt to society quickly.
Hard labour is different in most cases. The person is sent off, usually to camps, and forced to live under specific, and usually horrible, conditions. Food and rest are dictated by those in charge of the camp. It is often such that the food given is not enough to sustain the gruelling hard labour they are doing. So essentially, people are starving. So yeah, it is horrible! But a convenient way to get rid of political rivals! Let’s add onto this, just to make people uncomfortable, that US prisons use hard labour 😀 And the Soviet Union, and North Korea, and Nazi Germany… Boy, what a list.
Punitive vs Rehabilitative
What one has to take into account here is that you will be showing some of the values of the society. One big one is the divide between punitive vs rehabilitative systems. Most of the civilised world these days goes for a rehabilitative system where the point of sentences is to rehabilitate a person back into society.
The point of a punitive system is simply to punish someone. The entire point of all punishments is to make the person having committed a crime to suffer as much as the harm they themselves have caused by violating the laws of the society. This can be through all means above, it can be through others, but the point is to make them suffer for their deeds.
Rehabilitative is different in that the system wants the culprit to come back to society and not repeat it and be functional. These systems minimise the damage the punishment does. Which is important because the emotional, psychological, and social damage some punishment can cause can make a person much more likely to recommit crimes. Though other methods can be used to make it so that damage is minimised while also making certain that further crimes are not committed while rehabilitating in the hope that the person can one day reenter society.
Types of legal systems
When it comes to legal systems, it is a complicated mess that I cannot properly cover. So I will instead do the next best thing and divide it up as I see fit best! Almost like I usually do this 🤔 Anyway, when it comes to legal systems, we can subdivide them into several categories based on how they treat laws.
Civil law
One of the large two options is civil law, which most of the world uses unless they were British colonies. The big thing in civil law is the written law. What the law literally says is the most important, and the judges do not get to make up their own interpretation. If the law does not explicitly state it covers some specific scenario that the judge is facing, it is not applicable.
A way to look at it is that in civil law, the law tells the rules, and the judges try to apply it to the situation at hand and have to be rule sticklers. So a bit like Monopoly, but no house rules.
A benefit of this system is that it tends to be more legally stable, but the negative is that it tends to also be a lot slower as it places more work on lawmakers. Though not as free as the common law judges, the judges still have some level of freedom.
Common law
This one developed in England so surprise surprise it is popular in the Anglo-Saxon sphere of influence today. While civil law places importance on the written word of the law, common law places importance instead on the interpretation of the written law. Judges are given more power in interpreting the law, and laws can be expanded thanks to the judge’s interpretations of the laws.
A way to look at it is like a TTRPG, like D&D, Pathfinder, etc, where you have rules written by the company, but the dungeon/game master makes the decisions in the field and can change/create rules built on pre-existing ones done by the company.
The benefit is the same as with game masters: they can make quick decisions, and you don’t need to wait for the next edition to come out to know what to do. The bad part is, however, that if a judge of one level says one thing, one above can say differently, and suddenly laws change. Or if it's the highest court, it can change anyway as they change their minds. There is also the issue of the laws not being representative of the people in democracies as often judges are not elected.
Divine law
It’s on the tin can. This is law based on a religious doctrine and how it all relates to a specific religion that is in charge. So as one can expect, this is most common in theocracies. Actually, it isn’t, that was a filthy stinking lie. It is used these days in non-theocracies in a lot of places, but those places are heavily religious. The important thing for these, I would say, is that the laws are considered to come directly from the deity or deities that the society believes in. The judges, who often coincide with clergy here to varying degrees, have the job of understanding what the divine purpose of the laws and such in a situation is meant to be. Not an easy task, if you ask me.
The benefit is that for a religious society, it can hold people strongly to the law as their religious beliefs and laws strongly coincide. The big issue is that as society evolves, the laws themselves can be incredibly stagnant to texts or views that no longer reflect society.
To continue the game analogy I have been going at, this one is like if D&D makers did everything exactly like Tolkein had, since those who played were predominantly Tolkeinites, and everything had to always go by what the great god of Tolkein had said.
Canon law
No, this is not a law body that decides what is canon and what is not when it comes to franchises. Though I am 90% certain this is where the word comes from. Anyway, it is similar to divine laws in that it has to do with religions and it requires a highly religious society to be viable. The difference lies in the perception of the source. While in divine law, the law is supposedly directly from the deity/ies directly in some manner, in canon law it is more earthly in that it is human interpretation and making of laws.
This allows canon laws to take more things into account and allows a broader view of purpose, application, and meaning. So compared to divine law it is more pragmatic, but compared to the previous secular options it is more restricted. It can, however, take on characteristics of both civil and common law.
Again, if we do the game comparison, this is D&D a bit as it is. It took inspiration from Tolkein but took the pragmatic perspective of not ripping it entirely off and changed rules to fit the game and need of people, rather than adhering to Tolkein no matter what.
Mixed law
Of course, with all of these you can mix and match to varying degrees. And no one is really true to only one, and within each of these large groups, there exists variants in the details.
Judicial roles
When it comes to the judicial system, there are many roles that needs to be filled, some of them are as follows:
Law enforcement: They enforce the law in everyday life.
Crime investigators: They investigate potential crimes.
Grand Jury: They decide if a crime has likely been committed.
Prosecutor: They decide if, given the evidence, they should prosecute the criminals.
Defender: Those responsible for defending the accused.
Judge: The one in charge of the court and its proceedings.
Jury: The ones who decide if the accused has reasonably committed the crime.
Sentencer: The one who gives the sentence if a crime is found to have been committed.
Executioner: The one who makes certain that the sentence is carried out.
There are many more roles, but these are the most obvious ones to focus on. They have not always been separate and many of these do still to this day fuse together depending on what part of the laws is being dealt with. A common trend in the world is that the harsher the punishment, the more of the roles tend to be separated as the damage for an error increases fast then.
Custom Law
So you want to make your own system, huh? Well, as always, I am here for you and very much in love! ♥️ But this is by no means an easy task; it is really hard. Which is why so many of them are based on the adversarial common law style of the U.S.A. So honestly, just picking civil law, or anything not common law, will make your world stand out to many consumers.
Another factor to consider is the adversarial nature that is commonly depicted. While the accuser and the accused/defendant are opposites in terms of their goal, the system itself can be more cooperative in nature where both are trying to reach the truth. The adversarial nature arises easily when both sides have more to gain by their side winning regardless of the truth. If they do not stand to gain as much, it is much easier for the system to be more cooperative, where both sides reach a conclusion, even if they disagree initially on what it is.
You can also consider where differences can be done is the division of roles. Where lines are drawn and who does what and which are fused and how much is split will also determine how the legal system works. On top of this is, of course, also what the court itself is after, punishing wrongdoers or helping them become part of society again?
I will do a practicum on this once I have fleshed it out more, and we will see which faction I will do it on!
Summa summarum
So what have we learned through all of this? Law is hell! Nah, it is an important part of a functional society, but it is very complicated. It is about people interpreting what people say and think and what society wants in order to function. It is also about adapting to an ever changing world which is why so much of it is what many would call “word plays” or semantic talks.
While you can go for common law á la USA, it is by far the most commonly seen and the far most boring one because of it. You can spice things up by dividing up powers differently and not having the judge be able to do as much. While it is fun to talk about “precedence” and all that, it can get very tiring storywise. Be creative and not stuck because, as I say in my rules of worldbuilding, ignorance is your greatest limiter! Hopefully, this has given you a start to think about. I will come back one day and dive more into each one, but for now, this is all!
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Copyright ©️ 2024 Vivian Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as the various systems of law and order and types of roles are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific ideas such as Law and Order the show and all language or exact phrasing are individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
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