Huh, what's he up to, it sounds like a nice liberal reform proposal. 

She takes a few moments to think the law through, turning it over in her mind, and then claps. 

There's an exception for conscription, so he sees no reason to mind. This is a perfectly sensible decree to protect the rights of the accused, the sort that suggests that Bellumar was a reasonable appointment prospect for Her Majesty to choose.

He won't clap, but he will smile approvingly.

What a great law I drafted.

Alexandre could try to mess this up for fun but he won't because it would be rude to the Queen.

The new judiciary committee was influenced by the reactionary conservative nobility right?  So why does his proposal sound like a moderate liberal proposal protecting commoners?  What’s the catch?  She needs to figure it out to tell Thea.

There’s problems with the law, of course, but he knows the goal here and agrees achieving it is inarguably worth the price. He won’t say a word against the proposal.

Victòria is really confused! Delegate Bellumar is one of the Evil nobles who took over the Judiciary Committee, but the law sounds totally reasonable, maybe he's... trying to come up with an excuse to keep innocent people in prison for a week? But it's not like anyone would stop him from doing that now. Maybe the paladins came up with this one?

Is it really ambiguous that limiting detention for a crime might ban conscription? Is there anything else in that category? Bans requiring people to go to school, maybe, via the most expansive possible reading, but they were against that anyway, so that one seems fine...

Particularly if teleported….

the Lawful Forms of Conscription and the Corvée

Is it making it illegal for the archmage to force her and the sortition delegates to work at the convention?  She would like to go home, but would it stop voluntary working sortition delegates, like Oriol or Enric?

She gets up to get in line and get anonymity.

It is a nice proposal! Not only liberals are opposed to injustice.

Huh, is this one is basically aimed at her? She thinks through how it would have applied to her case. Forcing them to teleport her back to the coast... well, it'd have been slightly annoying to ride back to Westcrown, but hardly a deal breaker. Do they want to ensure any enemies that flee stay gone? Or maybe it's from the other direction, and they're mad she wasn't charged with a crime? Probably she should vote against it, on the grounds that any law her enemies want to have apply to her has a good chance of being something she doesn't want, but Alicia doesn't see an angle for arguing.

"This law protects criminals at the expense of honest men. Why should we limit our courts to holding people for a mere seven days while they conduct an investigation? If an investigation is so complicated that a criminal must be held for longer than a week, why should our magistrates not be permitted to allow such a thing? It is not unreasonable to want to do a thorough investigation, particularly in areas with limited access to truth magic."

Seven days is a lot longer than almost anyone would spend on an actual investigation before bringing charges, if they've already arrested a suspect, but that's not the point.

"You don't have to be done investigating in seven days, you just have to specify what crime you are investigating. If you think someone's a bandit, charge them with banditry and keep investigating."

If conservative nobles genuinely oppose this that raises the odds it is not a trick… but the nobles are well coordinated, a few bits of false opposition would be trivial for them to arrange to cover up the real trick.

She was being an idiot, she should check with Reuben Oriol first if he wants to stay before speaking up.  So she sits back down and whispers to him.

“Do we count as detained?  Is it sending us home?  Did you want to stay?”

"I think this is a good law. If the government wants to arrest your family they should have to at least tell you why as soon as they can, they shouldn't be allowed to just make people disappear and not even tell you what they did."

She is very obviously speaking from experience.

“She said most of what I was about to say. If they keep someone more than seven days, do they have to make the charge public? So family and friends can know what it is and whether to petition?”

"I am not prepared to require yet that charges always be made public. Sometimes there is a national interest in secrecy - say, if we've tracked down half a cult and are tracking down the other half. I would say in that situation you should always petition and hopefully that'll prompt either a release or at least an adequate explanation. And Judiciary can consider if there's a version of a right for charges to be public that would not unacceptably impede the Queen's people in doing secret things as they'll sometimes need to."

"This indeed seems a wise law, and one sorely necessary in those sad cases when those appointed by the old regime continue in their habits. But I worry that it imposes too great a burden on those who seek to protect order. It is often necessary to lock up a troublemaker for a short time so as to prevent their making trouble, and I should not like to limit that time to a week, nor to require a magistrate to get involved to lengthen it." 

That's just saying that the watch should be allowed to lock anyone up for any amount of time for no reason, which now that she thinks about it is indeed sort of fucked up.

"This seems like it's a lot more complicated than it needs to be. Actually, a lot of the laws we've been making have been more complicated than they need to be. Maybe it's a good law, maybe it isn't, I don't see how anyone is supposed to know one way or the other when it's too long to keep the whole thing in your head at once."

Skill issue.

The Sower is right, but Enric has already given up on actually understandable laws. He hasn’t given up on some right to public charges. Maybe the noble can afford to always send a petition, but ink and paper are expensive and finding someone who knows how to write petitions will be hard. Thats the judiciary committee’s job, though, Lluisa and the paladins can probably handle it.

This Abyss-bound fool isn't so stupid he can't attempt cunning. What's his plan? ...Hmm, maybe?

Message to Barrister Oriol: Does this require the archmages to send the sortition delegates home?