"We've not gotten that far in Judiciary but I can make a note to push it tomorrow."

What has judiciary even been doing???? Civil courts are extremely important!!!

"Thank you, I think that would be a good idea."

Well, it was re-formed abruptly after the first few days, and today they talked about getting the paladins off the fucking assizes,,,,,

"A full system of civil courts seems unlikely to be concluded quickly, so we may have to assess things as torts without full knowledge of what that will entail. I agree that supporting your wife as well as the children seems like an oversight more than a difference of opinion. Delegate Roig, I think you gave us that language, would you agree?"

"Certainly I meant that a man living with his wife and and children ought to be providing for them, but in the case where separation or divorce are justified, I would be hesitant to oblige him to support his former spouse. There are cases when it might be correct to so oblige him, I suppose. For one thing, when if she has his small children in her care, providing for her and providing for the children are not easy to separate."

"The whole project relies on having civil courts either way, because if we're requiring people to get married then we need civil courts to manage those marriages and any divorces.

The case for making it a crime is that it's in fact extremely costly for the state. You two weren't here, but - last committee we discussed the fact that Cheliax is currently spending nearly six million gold a year on the orphanages, more than half the cost of the entire army. That's after cutting costs by half, and shutting down daycare services that huge numbers of women used to rely on. The children are in many places quite literally starving. We need to fix child abandonment, first and foremost, and that goes back to women having been abandoned or never given support in the first place. I'm not an expert on legal systems, but - that's the goal, here. I think we were thinking the penalty would be a fine paid to the mother?"

"The mother who....also was promiscuous and carelessly conceived a child she couldn't care for? Or are we talking about cases where he forced her?"

"If someone who'd know told me that eighty percent of Chelish children were conceived by force I would not be particularly moved to protest the figure."

That doesn't sound right but he doesn't know enough about Avistan to dispute it.

Victòria doesn't really think it's that high either? She should've been killing way more men back home if it was really that high but that doesn't seem like it can be right, eight men in ten aren't rapists. But she doesn't actually have any idea what the number is.

"Surely not eighty percent. Certainly it is a problem, but I do not think that it is the source of our orphanage situation."

"Oh, I believe many children conceived by force are raised by their mothers, but it is certainly a feature of the landscape."

"As a general principle you get more of what you pay for so an expected consequence of paying women for having illegitimate children would be more women having illegitimate children. Of course if a woman is forced it is reasonable to confiscate much or all of the property of her attacker to compensate her and her family, and to oblige the attacker to marry her if she wants that. I think this holds regardless of how often the two things are happening."

"...if a man forces a woman you should hang him, you shouldn't let him marry her. Taking his stuff and giving it to her sounds fine."

"It might be that if you pay them for having illegitimate children the thing you buy is fewer of them smothering the illegitimate children."

"The question of force is... complicated. I would say instead that the previous legal definition of rape excludes many types of forcing someone to have sex, and is not very relevant to the situation on the ground.

But no, I don't mean to limit it to cases where force was used. Fundamentally, we target the father because the mother is already paying for it. I think Delegate Napaciza suggested that the fine be waived if the man proposes and the woman accepts, so we're only punishing cases where the man either refuses, or the woman judges that he is worse than nothing. Or - worse than an amount of gold that is probably less than what the child will cost her, in any case."

He is still pretty sure that if you pay someone a large sum of money for something, such as being promiscuous and having a child outside wedlock, you will get more of it, even if the sum of money is less than all of the costs of doing that, particularly if some people are already doing it anyway.

But he has already said this and if saying it the first time did not make an impression saying it the second time seems very unlikely to, so he does not say it again.

Nah, it's a point.

"We admittedly might need to additionally criminalize infanticide to prevent people from attempting to deliberately bear bastards for the fine money without paying the associated costs. But - every woman who is raising a child alone right now could have killed or abandoned it, and chose not to. More than half of the men in Egorian already did."

"Infanticide has already technically been criminalized but this appears to have been met with some incredulity, and this incredulity was anticipated in advance, so when I encountered people who'd done it I was meant to let them off with a warning." Has he mentioned he didn't enjoy assizes.

"...Why are you letting them off with a warning??" Aren't paladins supposed to be Good, or at least Neutral??

"....is it not, like, very ordinary behavior where you come from?"

"The sentencing options conscionably possible in an assizes context are extremely limited and the policy approach was not to prosecute infanticide specifically because we did not think anyone would believe, just from it having been decreed without any special wording specifying that infants were included, that it was really illegal. I imagine some people smother infants in Molthune but it is rarer and shameful."

" - no, I meant where Ferrer comes from."

"...no, I mean, it's normal, but that doesn't mean it's — if I murdered an innocent baby people shouldn't just treat it like that was fine! The baby didn't do anything to deserve it!" It's not upsetting to think about the way it's upsetting to think about people murdering someone a little older, but that doesn't mean — she doesn't think she'd want to kill someone over it, but maybe she should want to—