"In favor."

Llei frankly sees no reason to criminalize informing anyone at all of a manticore or its activities, but there's admittedly no completely clean line between manticores and mountain orcs and bandit orcs and bandit non-orcs and regular people who may or may not have committed crimes. ...except that all but the last are pretty unlikely to prosecute someone for slander.

"In favor."

Fine. "Yes."

"Thank you all. We can continue through the matters introduced last week, but none of those are time-sensitive except in that the peace and stability of Cheliax is always measured in lives, so if any member has their own proposal which is time-sensitive I would pause here for the committee to entertain it."

"I have no proposals so pressing that we cannot finish the committee's old business first."

"One part of the committee's old business was considering how to ensure the independence of the judiciary from the nobles. I'm seeing- with great pleasure- the paladin circuits coming to administer justice, and they are certainly welcome in the Western Hills. On that note, I would like to move that we retain this process- paladins, circuits and all, as well as enshrining the principle of an independent judiciary- in the future laws of Cheliax. Indeed, being from outside the county, and being expected to return to their base at a certain point, should give petty tyrants something to think about."

"I would advise against trying to make paladin assizes a long term feature of justice in Cheliax for several reasons. The Glorious Reclamation forces will no longer be recruiting at nearly the clip that we did when Cheliax's rule by Hell was an ongoing atrocity, and our funding sources are likewise expected to dwindle; I wouldn't be surprised if we were dissolved as an order entirely within the decade, though I am not aware of any specific plan for this. Iomedae is not choosing new paladins or clerics at anything remotely resembling her usual rate and we do not expect Her to resume doing so for the foreseeable future, so even if the Reclamation itself was unaffected by the completion of its driving mission, the paladin supply will diminish to normal attrition. The job is not, from a paladin-maintenance perspective, a good one; part of why we are trustworthy to perform high-stakes morally difficult work like itinerant justice is that we will stop and reassess after making one catastrophic mistake rather than a string of dozens of them, but that one mistake is still how you lose a paladin and many of us would function more sustainably in a less ethically compromising line of work. Cheliax is presently operating under very few and simple laws, but as the number of them mounts it is likely to become difficult to conscionably swear to uphold them in our circuits, as they become more likely to contradict each other, our vows, or the concerns of Law and Good."

"Do you think these 'Assizes' could be done by good clerics, or perhaps even mortal men, with a yearly administered battery of truth spells?"

"I have no objection to the assizes structure, per se, and truth spells might suffice to keep a judge's incentives aligned."

"Some countries manage assizes well enough without divine enforcement of the decency of the judges, and with a great deal of gratitude to the Reclamation I imagine that's the direction we ought to be headed in. Though I also think having stable non-travelling courts authorized at least to handle straightforward and urgent cases is important. On several different occasions I have learned of murders on my roads, tracked down the bandits, and then had to divert an enormous number of resources to feeding and guarding them while we sent around for someone authorized to try them; I think a good many people are under the circumstances just not accepting surrenders, and that isn't ideal either."

"With all due respect, Duchess, it would be very easy for a noble (perhaps a holdover from the previous regime) to call an inconvenient person a murderer and to subsequently have them tried and killed. Their family and friends might appeal, if they had such, but it certainly seems to me to misalign incentives."

"I think that Her Majesty decided very wisely not to devolve authority wholly to the local nobility, and with insufficient manpower there will be great costs paid somewhere no matter what we do. But - ultimately every defender of the people of Cheliax against monsters makes life-and-death decisions on a regular basis, and has to be trustworthy to do so, and the more distant the judges the more that discretion will inevitably be employed."

"Ah, well, men are a very different thing than monsters." Séfora shrugs back her cowl, letting her brass skin shine. "Very different."

She sighs. "I myself have killed many monsters. It is a thing that must be done. The difference is that when killed monsters, I became a beacon of good, and when I killed men, I lost that. From that I learn that it is a different thing, and should have different rules." 

"I assume the Judiciary committee is contemplating what to replace the assizes with, and it's out of scope for us?" she asks the paladin.

"It seems within the Judiciary committee's remit though it has not come up in specific."

"Even beyond the issues with a growing number of laws, not all of which might be approved of by paladins, I understand that in the sparser parts of the country, justice and taxation were often the responsibility of the same person, appointed by the distant Crown. I would be reluctant to ask a paladin to collect the Queen's taxes, once the tax holiday comes to an end.

When I spoke to peasants about it, they hoped the 'Egorian man' would never return, and I am not convinced replacing him with a Westcrown man will do much better. Perhaps we should gratefully acknowledge the Glorious Reclamation assizes as a temporary measure, and require their permanent replacements to be selected by the local lord from the residents of the region they will judge?"

"I like this word, 'Incentives', that the Paladins use. That is poor incentives. Good nobles-" If they exist, outside Quirze- "will certainly not abuse the power that our new member suggests, but a generation from now, their children will perhaps not have been selected for virtue by an archmage.  If trusted with such a responsibility, some will abuse it to place in charge their cronies, as was done in the Western Hills, and which caused a rebellion with some loss of life."

Thiiiis seems like it probably mostly has to do with how completely horrible in every way the men from Egorian are. Menadorians actually have the privilege of dispensing local justice - unique in the modern empire, he thinks, and mostly because travel is so dangerous - but he's not sure he really wants to call attention to that, since in the current context it's kind of a concerning place for nobles to have retained the ancient right to hear cases. Even though the Archduke Narikopolus has suspended it for kind of a lot of people, right now. Probably they will lose it soon, but it'll be kind of fair, as long as they lose it to someone capable of moving.

"I agree that this seems very centrally like a question for the judiciary committee."