He is losing his confidence that she isn't a natural Asmodean who somehow did enough Good to land in Axis anyway. Complete with petty insults.

"You have certainly simplified something, and yet I am no better equipped to parse your intent," he says, and takes on a tone like a mixture between a drill sergeant and a bored primary school teacher, "Allow me to attempt to rephrase, and perhaps you will see how one who wants to maintain Law in an environment with potential Asmodeans must speak."

"First, we require that each lord defend the territory he has been granted, enforcing the law properly and preventing the passage of criminals from elsewhere, as best as he can."

"Second, we provide a right to all subjects, that if their lord is failing in his duty, they may contact the lord's liege or a neighboring lord to request they act on it instead. And that those requests cannot be punished by the original lord, if they were honest pleas."

"And if we are to add the anonymous boxes, then, thirdly, that we encourage lords to set up boxes which can be used for anonymous requests in writing. That those anonymous requests remain valid, and must remain anonymous."

"Plainly stated, with as little flowery language or room for deception as possible. An anti-Asmodean phrasing, for those who expects all fancy words to be hiding daggers, which is to say, everyone not resurrected or immigrated in the last two years."

"That's -  a different law and a much worse one I wouldn't vote for. You can't just write that you require something with no provisions for who checks if the requirement is met or what they do if it's not. You can't say 'enforcing the law properly', that assumes everyone already agrees on what's proper. If you're mandating something, you have to have in mind who is checking if it's done and what the punishment is. I don't think there's an enforceable requirement that someone do their best as a lord, which is why I didn't write one into law. 

I have no trouble believing that those of you who survived Asmodean rule have difficulty writing and interpreting laws because of how law worked under the diabolist state. But I think that's a reason to think you don't know how laws work, not a reason to do it your way."

"If you intend it to do a different thing, change the words. But if you want the laws to be seen as Lawful, not as tricks to trap honest men, phrase it in the manner I used, and not the one you began with. Unless the rest of the committee says they prefer your way?"

The committee consists of a damned man, a peasant, a bandit lord, a Calistrian and a tiefling and precisely nobody who Carlota would expect to have ever read a non-Asmodean law. 

"That the paralictor's law is different seems to prove the point. When the Queen appoints new judges, we all pray that they will be honest men, but they will not be Axis lawyers. They will, by and large, be men educated in the Asmodean fashion. I guessed - correctly, it sounds - that the original proposal meant not to have teeth to force lords to protect their lands, but to provide real protection for peasants offering complaints. But this was a guess. I would not want a judge to guess differently."

"I see. I'm worried that existing legal traditions do things the way they do for a reason, that things which seem to a suspicious observer to be flourishes are in fact important for the law being unambiguous, and that if we change lots of those things then that will have unintended consequences, but I can attempt a few rewritings of each proposal tonight and the committee can discuss whether any phrasing exists that is clear to former Asmodeans and clear under existing legal precedents.

In the meantime perhaps we can visit Séfora's proposals, which cannot be accused of having that problem. The first was..."Should peasants and villages be permitted to form village councils by vote among the villagers?" That is.... not illegal under the existing law. Does anyone wish to argue that it ought to be?"

"I mean, you can form a council but if it's anything more than a knitting circle it will feel pretty illegal soon enough."

"Can you describe what you mean by 'feel pretty illegal'?"

"The same kinds of people who bother you if you're skipping church or keeping a kid back from school or come up a little short on the taxes sniff around that kind of thing."

"And now that we've abolished schools and don't mandate attending any church are there still people, uh, enforcing that in your area?"

"Not those things specifically but there are some sniffing types still."

"So possibly, even though it is already legal for villages to have a council if they'd like and some do, it'd still be useful to people to have it in the law that a village may form a council and may select a leader by election or by income or by lots or by any other method they like, but that they're not obliged to have a council or for it to have a leader. I'm a bit tempted to refer that over to the Rights committee but we can write it up, either way."

When Carlota brings her proposals back, she looks surprised. She expected them to be quietly burnt by the end of the day.

"Thank you, Delegate Carlota," she murmurs. 

....you know, in the bandit lord's defense she has probably never encountered an objection to her that was genuinely process-oriented. "We'll go through every proposal anyone submitted, in the order they were submitted absent reason to reorder. I may vote against them but it's my job as chair to raise them, let everyone weigh in, and put them down as a recommendation if the committee votes in favor of them."

"Frankly I'd like it if my villages had a clear leader whose job it was to be the point person for any contact with the higher-ups. Like a mayor, only -" he makes a palms-a-vertical-inch-apart gesture - "smaller."

"Yes. The reason I put in rules about limits on organizing militias is because I assumed nobles would want them but would be occasionally abusing them as unpaid labor. If we can get anywhere just by making them easier, all the better. And even if something is already the law maybe it'll be easier to get out word of it if it's in the constitution. As long as we don't end up with five hundred things in the constitution."