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Posted by Marie Brennan

https://bookviewcafe.com/new-worlds-courts-and-appeals/

https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=19134

A complex system of laws leads to a complex system of courts. Quite apart from the specialization inherent in attorneys and judges not being able to know every corner of the law equally well, there’s the simple matter of volume: if you try to funnel every case through the same venue, you’re going to wind up with unconscionably long delays . . . as some actual legal systems have discovered the hard way!

To solve this, You can simply have a bunch of identical courts and assign cases to them according to which one currently has the shortest docket — but that’s not usually how societies handle it. Instead, we use several principles to distribute the load in a manageable fashion.

One way to divide it up, predictably, is by type of law. Divorce courts specialize in issues of property, alimony, and child custody; criminal courts specialize in questions about culpability and standards of evidence. What types of court a society has tells you something about its priorities: the Crown of Aragón (western Spain) used to have the Consulate of the Sea, an institution that administered maritime and commercial law — very important for a region that thrived on Mediterranean trade! Meanwhile, cases of heresy went before the Inquisition, and divorce courts were not needed at all, because nobody could get divorced. (Requests for annulments did go through the Church, though.) A fantasy society might well need courts to regulate magical matters.

Alternatively, it might be less a question of specialized subject matter and more a question of authority. Who has the right to hear certain kinds of cases? It’s not uncommon historically for ordinary murders to be handled by ordinary courts, but the murder of someone of status — a nobleman, a government official, a member of the religious establishment — to fall under a different jurisdiction. Same fundamental crime, but the jurisdiction changes based on the details. Here in the United States, certain types of case have to be tried in federal courts because of the complex interaction between state and federal (national) law. In a spacefaring science fictional world, there might be a court responsible for disputes involving multiple sentient species, especially if they can’t all inhabit the same courtroom environment at once.

Jurisdiction can also be geographically based — which isn’t the same as fixed! When the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe was stabbed in Deptford, that was found to have occurred “within the verge,” meaning within twelve miles of where the Queen happened to be at the time of the stabbing. Since crimes in the vicinity of the monarch might indicate a threat to the monarch, his death had to be investigated by the royal coroner. Even when the areas of responsibility are fixed, a lot of complication can arise from the question of where exactly a crime occured — especially when you don’t have fine-grained tools like GPS to pinpoint the jurisdictional boundary. Whether the relevant courts fight to claim the case for their own or try to fob it off on their neighbor like a live grenade will depend on the circumstances . . .

Circuit courts are an interesting instance, because their jurisdictions are fixed, but once upon a time, the courts themselves were not. That term “circuit”? It originally referred to the route each such court traveled through the countryside, hearing cases in one locale before moving on to the next. Since the average person couldn’t afford the time and expense of journeying to a central settlement to get justice, an itinerant court brought that justice to them — though not necessarily in a timely manner, depending on the size and frequency of the circuit. I feel there’s great narrative potential in this setup, with a protagonist braving the hazards of the kingdom’s hinterlands to settle whatever types of disputes fall under their authority!

As that example shows, courts are not necessarily always in session, at least not in a given location. It’s very common, especially before full-scale modern bureaucracy, for certain types of court to be held only at certain times: England’s quarter sessions, for example, sat (as the name suggests) four times a year, on the “quarter days” scheduled roughly around the equinoxes and solstices. These sporadic courts often handle bigger and more important bits of business, leaving more routine matters to what English legal parlance called the petty sessions, which sat more frequently.

Depending on the nature of the case and the legal system, it might have to wend its way through the lower courts first, or it might automatically be bounced up there. If the former, the process might be driven by the people involved in the case, or by the person in charge of overseeing it. A judge, for example, might need to formally establish that a murder victim’s identity makes their death a matter for a higher authority, or that theft or damage involved property of great enough value that it’s outside the judge’s own bailiwick. Or maybe the case is too complex and confusing, so off it goes to somebody who can hopefully make better sense of it — or who has the political clout to survive passing down a dangerous judgment. (The live grenade again!)

Meanwhile, a case might be shifted by the participants as a matter of appeal. Plaintiff or defendant doesn’t feel the original judge or jury has truly served justice; maybe someone else higher up the chain will decide differently? Whether or not you’re allowed to try again can depend on everything from the nature of the case, to the judgment originally handed down, to new evidence, to whether you have enough money to buy yourself a new go at the problem.

In modern times we have courts of appeal baked into our system, but the roots of this tend to lie in the much simpler principle of “beg the king, as the highest authority in the land, for the justice someone else has denied you.” This can blur over into the topic of pardons, previously discussed in Year Seven, when what you’re asking for the king (or whoever) to overturn is your conviction for a crime, or its private-law equivalent. The difference lies in whether that authority is declaring your innocence/lack of culpability or at least your justifiable excuse for your actions — that latter common in the royal Good Friday Pardons of early modern Spain; your Majesty, I had really good reason for stabbing that guy — or saying you’re guilty, but forgiven anyway. If what you’re appealing is a decision declaring that someone else is innocent and doesn’t owe you anything, it’s more visibly a different matter.

With all of these overlapping systems potentially in play, it’s no wonder we need specialists to help us navigate them. But whether you want it for a background detail, as your protagonist’s patrimony is drained away by a years-long legal dispute over inheritance, or as the engine for the episodic tale of a traveling judge, it can take a case out of a generic “court” and into something much more specific and flavorful.

https://bookviewcafe.com/new-worlds-courts-and-appeals/

https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=19134