"Pleased to meet you. I'd be happy to talk about that. Do you have a particular proposal you'd like me to look at?"

"Not specifically." It turns out writing laws is hard. She's got to get over herself and do it, but it was hard enough writing the bulk of the libraries proposal. "I think I am first asking for advice." Maybe she shouldn't be? Frick, she's got to stop expecting everyone else to do things for her. Too late now.

"I think that there should be certain rights and protections that contracts are not allowed strip people of, though I'm not yet sure exactly which ones. And I worry that any list I come up with won't protect anyone whose contract mandates absolute obedience to someone, since they can always be given orders that punish them for exercising those rights. The Archduke Narikopolus mentioned at one point that in Menador you had advised against promises of obedience in marriage."

"Yes. - to be clear, that is the custom everywhere else I have heard of, and it is a good custom there, and probably the healthiest natural arrangement between men and women. But it is very dangerous in Cheliax. The Asmodeans specifically sought to poison obedience, and to encourage the abuse of those who must obey you, and it will be at least the work of a generation to change that.

In Lastwall people who are sworn to an order, or to the army, pledge to obey lawful orders, and it is illegal to give unlawful ones. I think it is a good system and I would be cheered to see it copied here. Apprenticeships have standard agreements that the guilds arrive at, which include standards for what constitutes abuse of an apprentice and when you can dismiss one."

"Do you have a list of what constitutes abuse? The rights committee spoke about illegal orders yesterday, and it was helpful, but it's not immediately clear to me how to import some of the categories to an arrangement that isn't a martial one." Korva strongly doesn't think that women should promise to obey men as a matter of course, and can't really imagine the circumstances which would lead her to believe that it was healthy, but an understanding that they shouldn't do it here and now is good enough for her purposes.

"I think it's different for every guild, unfortunately, as different kinds of hazards are considered natural to the job, but they're all going to be something like, you have to give them holy days off, you can't assign them work that's too dangerous, you cannot forbid or prevent them from healing injuries, you can whip them for some kinds of infractions but not others and only so much, you have to recompense them if you damage, destroy, or take their property....you have to teach them mastery of the trade, obviously -  

...there are other things I would include if I were writing these for Cheliax. Apprenticeship contracts in Lastwall do not specify that you cannot have sex with your apprentices, not because you can but because the law in Lastwall separately specifies that you cannot coerce anyone into sex, and that having sex with people you have lawful authority over counts. Apprenticeship contracts in Lastwall do not specifically forbid forcing your apprentices to sign further contracts because it is separately illegal to coerce anyone into signing a contract."

Isn't that... all marriages, in countries where women promise obedience? That doesn't seem like a wise thing to bring up. Not directly, anyway.

"The Duchess suggested that we at least make it count as rape if someone physically forces themselves on a slave, I think that's going through slavery. And that we ban consent to sex as a contract term for contracts that are not marriages, though I would sort of like to avoid special casing marriages as much as possible. I'd like for people to move towards getting married before having children, and to be legally held to the care of those children, so I also want measures that encourage marriage. But I'm worried that if many protections for indentures don't apply to marriages, and there are provisions encouraging people to marry, we'll just see people abusing the legal category, and weakening the concept of marriage further. But obviously you can't argue that people can't have sex with their spouses if their marriage agreement involves any kind of promise of obedience."