Korva continues to hate the theater, but the Archduchess likes it. "Yeah, I was there for that one. I don't expect it to be a major fight; it was an oversight in the original law, and the mechanism we have is a censorship board like the opposition wanted for everything, so I don't see how they can oppose it."

"How about the right not to be tortured."

"Rights had been talking about it as part of a longer list of basic rights that I think we intended to introduce as a set later, but if people are moving now then I guess we might have to do it piecemeal. It's tricky, is the thing. Limitations could be good, even if it was just 'you can only torture people if they actually committed crimes', but it's hard to actually define."

"I guess it depends what you say counts as torture," Mateu says dubiously. "If you have to wait for the paladins to even whip people then I think that'd make things lots worse."

"Right, if you don't have a clear definition then everyone assumes it's in a different place, and some people will assume that it means everything is banned, and other people will assume that it doesn't ban anything that seems normal to them. At some point you need to be able to punish people somehow. And yet it still might be nice if nobles couldn't, I don't know, put burning nails under people's skin for no reason. ...not actually sure whether that's technically illegal right now, I'm not sure I've seen a list of all the existing laws."

"I think that's illegal?"

        "I mean, I don't really think anyone'd get in trouble for it."

"Well, probably not."

"Right, so, that's the idea. Being clear on whether that's illegal or not. But it's hard, because you can't make a list of every specific thing people can and can't do to one another, and if you just say 'torture' then everyone thinks they know what that is, but I bet it turns out they all think it means different things."

"It doesn't really seem possible to make a law that does that but I guess that doesn't mean the convention won't try."

         "It seems like a better law than the one against bastards, what a nightmare."

"That one's mine." She's going to do her very best to say this confidently and casually and not apologetically. She thinks she gets pretty close. "It's nowhere near ready to go to the floor, yet, though, it needs a civil court system. Also to, like, come up with a legal definition of marriage."

"It'll indenture, like, all the men in Cheliax," says Mateu.

"Or they'll marry, or they'll stop. The orphanages have closed down half their services, and are still costing more than half as much as the entire military, which suggests that they were costing more than it before. I understand that infanticide is apparently legally considered to be murder, now, so in the future abandonment will increase even more. And we're not offering daycare, so it's way less possible than it was for a single woman to raise a child and work a job to feed him at the same time. Under those conditions, eiither men start raising their children, or the whole state is going to collapse under the weight of doing it for them."

Or we could just legalize infanticide again? Mateu's not sure why no one's considering that obvious reasonable option. He doesn't say that, obviously. "Well, the Duchess'll probably be with you."

"Anyway, I understand we need civil courts back either way, for businesses and stuff. Are any of the committees on that?"

"I don't think it's come up yet in Judiciary. I think Issa was looking at Cyprian's code, I bet someone's been reassigned to that but I don't know who..."

"Is that what they're using in Galt?" She has never heard any good things about Galtan politics but the Queen is a Galtan, so probably they should know anything about that.

"Yeah. I don't know much about it but a lot of the Duchess's allies like Cyprian's laws. When the Duchess comes back we can ask who's working on it now."

Cool.

.....she doesn't know what else they're supposed to be doing here. It seems like if there's nothing to immediately react to then they should be getting out ahead and working on their own stuff, but this isn't actually where she would do that, as far as her own priorities go.

"Do you care about travel passes?"

"Never traveled anywhere before three weeks ago. Do other countries have them, or is it just us?"

"I don't know. I think there's serfs everywhere but maybe usually there's not passes about it?"

"Well. I'd want to know what things are done everywhere and which would be radical changes, before I had an opinion on them." Is she going to have to come up with opinions on everything, now. Maybe she can offload most of that by figuring out what the other commoners want later.

"I can call in Sarei, she's from Andoran."

     Sarei is a young woman Korva's age with her hair cut like a man's. "Travel passes are Asmodean," she says immediately. "So's serfdom, the convention should abolish it. ...most places do serfdom. Most places don't do travel passes."

Shrug. "I guess let trade and travel get to work, then." Not that she necessarily has any reason to believe this person knows more than her about anything. They don't do travel passes in the Ironbound Islands but she's also not sure they have, like, written laws.

"So do you want to work on any of these, then? I guess the bastards one?"

"Sure, but it's stalled on civil courts. I guess I can work on writing up possible language for it ahead of time."

She feels very weird getting paid to... publicly brainstorm about her own ideas... but now that she thinks about it that's what the convention is, too.