Oh shit he hopes they don't ask him about the laws of holy Aroden. 

"I attended to your remarks on the floor and I think the Duchess Carlota said that your rules proposals were Asmodean. I will still listen to them but I do not think this committee owes it to you to assume you are not participating Evilly for personal gain."

“If you don’t want to just assume, I’ll say that Delegate Oriol is on the Virtuous Churches committee with me, and she hasn’t tried anything asmodean. Even if she was before, I don’t think she’s doing evil lawyer things anymore.”

She also looks too small and has acted too strange-but-helpful for Enric to really see her as a threat. He feels like he might become friends and doesn’t want to think about how she likely used to do all the things he’s heard of lawyers doing to people.

"I don't think it's necessary to deny her the ability to vote, anything where her vote would be decisive, half of the non-evil people also think is fine?"

"I didn't even say anything about taking away her vote, I just want to be sure everyone knows she's Evil! I mean, I think it's probably a good idea to take it away, but the most important thing is that we keep in mind that she's Evil in case she tries to sneak anything past us.

...Anyways, the rules that got passed today say we're supposed to vote on a chair, and that we can't nominate ourselves. Does anyone want to be chair?"

"Sorry, I must have misunderstood. Anyway, I nominate Valia Wain."

"I am willing to chair but I don't know much about judges and justice where it's not just Evil people killing anyone who annoys them. I suppose we can start by learning more about how that's supposed to work."

Well they definitely wouldn't accept a nomination for Lluisa and she thinks Taldaris is a fancy person like the nobles who keep causing problems, so who exactly could they get who does know much about judges and justice?

"I second Valia for chair."

"Valia sounds good to me!"

"Aye." Valia is at least on the right side of history.

“… aye.”

The scary faction is in charge, looks like, but at least they’ll probably like his ideas about appealing trials to good churches.

Why is she the scary faction? She wants perfectly reasonable things here, like laws that don't explicitly favor the nobility and safeguards to protect the interests of the vulnerable and a legally enshrined right to take vengeance on rapists and batterers!

None of his other committees started with an inquisition…

...he picked the wrong committee.

He can't quite get his mouth to say "yes, that person who probably wants me dead should be more important here" but since she clearly is he can manage a nod and affirmative-sounding noise when people are looking at him anyway.

"Select Wain is acceptable."

She has nothing like a mass abjuration prepared; fleeing the scene should the Calistrian escalate to open violence is probably the best option, even though it may end with other members dead or injured, which would be a pity. The best scenario would be the Calistrian lunging with a knife, rather than employing whatever unknown magic she may have of her god.

Valia might, one hopes, be able to moderate the rabid dog; though her track record isn't promising, she's of a Lawful god.

"All right, I guess that's unanimous?" Well she'll track down Feliu and Blai later and make sure she doesn't have wildly controversial opinions about the judiciary. "In that case I accept as chair and call this meeting to order." Some other committees say 'call this meeting to order' and it sounds very official. "We are concerned, I think, with ensuring that people can report crimes against their persons, and also that those trials won't be judged by Asmodeans and will be fair and give people who are innocent the chance to prove it. Does anyone wish to speak to the current state of the judiciary in their area?"

"Before he was killed, grievances were generally brought to the baron's office directly; he had a few people who he empowered to assign fines and lashes on his behalf, and then if a complainant came back again and said it hadn't been sorted out properly, and the staff didn't think they were being nuisances for no real cause, the accused'd go on a list and now and then he'd run through the list and deal with them himself, or sometimes toss a few to the cleric - I believe as some combination of distraction and appeasement. Obviously that's not a satisfactory system at all, but I think people did at least feel that they could go to that office if something happened."

"Has he been replaced or have you just got no baron now?" Pezzack has not replaced its nobility, and good riddance.

"No baron at the moment, no, but I have some claim and would love to be able to bring home a good judicial system to go with it."

Aha.

"That of Westcrown is physically destroyed, a loss largely unlamented; her Majesty has maintained Public Order, but Directly and by Ad-Hoc administration, and the opportunity for civil Suits has remained largely absent. Though the Courts of this City were of great Antiquity, established under Aspex, they had in past Decades been Rife with Devilry. The appointment of Judges is pressing, there being a considerable Backlog of Disputes."

A healthy city is full of burghers suing one another; it keeps the gold flowing.

“In my area— meaning anywhere close enough to our house that we don’t need a travel pass— it goes something like this. The baron and his guards sometimes said it was the law when they do things to people. Only when the priest of asmodeus or someone from town was around, the rest of the time they didn’t pretend. The priest sometimes visits for a few days and inquisitions, talking to people alone until someone turns on a neighbor.”

“The town has a magistrate who judges, when there’s a dispute or if someone causes trouble inside the town boundary. I don’t think she’s ever ruled for a farmer against a burgher, though. There’s also a lawyer, if you bribe him then he bribes the magistrate and they give you something light enough that you can walk home instead of being carried. He also sometimes tries to make you put your name on papers, when you’re dealing with someone in town and there’s a lot of money involved, says the papers will protect you if the other guy takes you to court. It’s usually a trick, in court the other guy can pay the lawyer more and then he sits on their side and says the paper actually means something different.”

“Baron and priest of asmodeus are dead now, magistrate is still there. Not that it matters much, no one decent has anything to do with the judiciary anyway. We just solve things ourselves.”

That's really just unsporting, they're probably just having the unlettered peasants sign "I admit all fault", imagine being a country lawyer and practically unlettered yourself, how embarrassing.

"In theory I think things were supposed to work basically like Delegate Porras just said, except that the official court was in the biggest town in the area, which was pretty far from where I lived. I think it was technically supposed to cover part of our barony and part of the barony next door. In practice if someone did something the lord or someone in his family or the priest didn't like — not the baron, a less important lord than that — they would just order them to be punished, and everyone would listen. Obviously they'd never, I don't know, punish someone in the lord's family for hurting a normal person, and sometimes they'd play favorites among the normal people too.

I think most of the things people went to the lord about were, like, theft, and I don't think he ever ordered anyone killed over it. I only remember one really serious case where it wasn't obvious what had happened, not counting all the times when it was obvious and the lord just didn't care. That time he ended up having a slave tortured to death over it, but even if everyone had been following the procedure with the courts he wouldn't have needed to go through them for that. ...He got it wrong, she admitted to it when she was getting tortured to death but it turned out later she was actually innocent." It didn't strike her as very important at the time but now that she thinks about it it's pretty fucked up how the lord just had an innocent slave tortured to death because he couldn't figure out what had actually happened.

"...I'd been assuming we were going to make a lot of changes to that, we were talking about some on some of my other committees but we mostly didn't get anywhere."