"Delegate Porras, how is this magistrate chosen?"

Enric shrugs. “They sent her from the city, I think?”

Lluïsa nods thoughtfully. "I have a suspicion that Appointment by the Local Lord would not much improve Matters, either. Perhaps with a Superior Queen the Quality might increase, but should we rely on this overmuch? If local Residents could have training in Law, they might select a trusted Judge. Though I am only Idly Musing, and have not considered the Matter deeply."

(i.e., they should send someone to be apprenticed to a smart city lawyer, but she's not just saying that with these lunatics on the committee.)

"I think it would probably depend a lot on how the judge was supposed to be selected. When we checked this morning there were loads of elected delegates who were Evil, and probably a lot more than that who were Evil but not strong enough to show it. I think maybe it's easier for Evil people to get chosen for that sort of thing, because they can just threaten everyone else into picking them?

...I kind of think it would help if we just said that nobles aren't allowed to judge cases at all, even if it's a really minor noble or a case that wouldn't normally be brought before a court or their town votes for them to judge. I bet almost all of them would abuse that kind of power, even if we get rid of all the nobles who are outright Evil."

"I like the idea of local residents picking, actually. The way we do it in Pezzack is after we drove the Asmodeans out we just had respected elders hear complaints, and it worked much much better than having the Asmodeans do it. They knew everyone, so they knew - things a judge from far away wouldn't know even if they weren't Evil. And nobles will always be self-interested but your neighbors grandmother mostly isn't trying to get rich."

"How did you decide which elders were respected and which one would get each case?"

"...it was not very formal. There were problems and we went for advice to the people you'd think of going to for advice, because they're wise, and then we started doing that as a matter of course."

"That might work in a city like Pezzack, but in a smaller community, everyone will have attachments, and trust in their impartiality will not last long. The grandmother might not be trying to get rich, but she probably isn't going to be sympathetic to claims that her grandson was the one that started a brawl."

"And even if you can find somebody who's not anybody's grandmother, they might have other biases - predictable ones somebody could exploit or unpredictable ones that could startle everybody and not be just."

"No one's perfect, but I think a person from far away is more likely to be biased towards - power, important people, money - than a person the villagers chose because they respected them."

"I think — one of the big problems for basically any way to do a justice system is that powerful important people get favored over normal people who are weaker than them. Sometimes that looks like, the judge's grandson gets accused of forcing himself on a woman, the judge isn't going to say he did it. But it also looks like — let's say you have two people, and one is, I don't know, a rich minor nobleman, and the other one is just a random servant, and somehow even though he's a noble it's gotten to the point of going to court — if the judge isn't absolutely positive it's the noble's fault they're just obviously going to rule in favor of the noble, because the noble can ruin their life a lot more than the servant can. I don't know how to fix this but I don't think just picking respected elders is necessarily enough, I think a lot of grandmothers aren't going to be brave enough to go up against the nobleman, even if they're not actually taking bribes or anything. ...Maybe that's not a problem in Pezzack because the powerful Evil people died trying to defend Asmodeus?

If we could get lots of Pharasmins everywhere we could check the judges every so often to see if they're Evil, but you'd need Pharasmins, most people aren't strong enough for a normal priest to check."

"I think maybe people from far away could be more impartial if they go back to being far away after not too long. So they can't take favors that rely on being in the same area. A minor lord can't really do much to somebody who's moving on in the next week."

“Choosing an elder works in my village, and it’s pretty small. Each time there’s a problem that needs judging, the two families involved have to agree on which elder. Usually there’s at least one man or woman that both families involved trust to be fair, not favor anyone. Or, if they can’t agree on one, the Sower comes around a few times a year and everyone trusts him to judge fairly because Erastil says he’s wise and good.”

”Victoria is right, it might not work with nobles. If we caught someone trying to mess with an elder for how she judged, no one would have anything to do with him. But a noble doesn’t really care about that; he’s not going to need another family to help when times are bad for him.”

”Judges who don’t know anyone and leave soon might be safer from that, but I don’t see how a stranger can judge right— someone making these decisions needs to know the people and their families and the history.”

"Can you give an example of when that context made an important difference?"

“Okay. This might be confusing because I’m not going to say anyone’s name, sorry about that.”

Brief flinch at bringing up the specifics of trouble that happened years ago. That’s usually a bad thing to do, might remind people of a grudge they’ve forgotten and bring it back. Nevermind that no one in this room knows anyone back home.  

”A few years ago, two boys got into a fight and one hurt the other bad enough that his family might have held a grudge over it. The elder they picked to decide made the one at fault go stay with the other family and help them. For however long it took the other boy to recover, and then an extra week.”

“It was a good decision, the family felt like that was enough to make it even. The two also got along better after a bit of time living in the same house and working together, stopped getting into fights with each other.”

”But it could have been a bad decision. The elder knew that the family would treat him fairly and that the boy was sorry and wouldn’t start another fight. But with a different family or a different fight, making that same decision might end with someone getting hurt.”

Wow, the family must have worked the other boy really hard if they all felt it was fair payback for hurting their kid. 

"If I were a far-away judge and this idea occurred to me at all I could just... ask the families if they thought it would work?"

“Usually asking the two families in a dispute  about each other won’t get you as much as you get by actually knowing them. Being in a dispute can make good memories into bad ones. Though it’s usually better than not asking at all.”

"I wonder if it'd be a good idea to have a statement of purpose, here, like some of the other committees have, for everybody to vote that we're on the right track. Things like - judges should be fair, they shouldn't favor someone over someone else just because they're rich or important or a noble. The Evil nobles will hate that but I think we outnumber them. Judges should not be possible to bribe or bully."

"I'm not sure there's more than a dozen people across all Cheliax who are impossible to bribe or bully. You can make it illegal to try, you can see about making it scarier to succumb than not to, but..."

"I think those are good ideas, and we should also say the laws should be fair. Right now there's a lot of laws where, even if they were enforced exactly the way they're written, they say that a noble should be punished less than a normal person for the same crime. That's unjust, nobles should be punished more, or at least it should be the same for nobles and normal people."

"I'm not entirely sure why we even have nobles but that's for another committee, I think....you can't make anyone impossible to bribe and bully but you can make it very hard, and illegal, instead of just how everything's supposed to work. Or you could do it with paladins. I think they can't be scared and can't be corrupted."

“I don’t know if anyone can get away with proposing a committee on alternatives to the nobility, especially since the queen personally picked them. My home had been doing okay without a baron or any other lords, so far, though…”

“Lastwall does it all with paladins, I hear, but I don’t think we have enough of them to do that here. Do we have enough clerics to put magistrates in a truth spell every year, ask if they’ve been bribed or threatened?”

It hadn't even occurred to her that they could just not have nobles at all! What a great idea.

"The Itarii don't have nobles and it works fine for us. The Rokoa--our leaders--are usually the previous Rokoa's daughters, but not always, and any other children the Rokoa has aren't treated any differently from anyone else."