damselfish | magical politics

Studying for the bar means I have no time to write which means all sorts of ideas are percolating through my brain. Fortunately I haven't gotten anything really driving-- nothing that makes me sit down and write something out, but a lot of things that fill me with vague twinges of anxiety about having to do something now. "You have to fix this now!" "How?" "...I dunno but fix it!" "'Kay. You work on that."

But one strange thing that's happened is a very old project-- from college old-- rearing up and forcing me to look up a piece about trustee issues for enemy warships found 200 years after the war.* Sentient warships.

"Wow. Sam. You have a thing for sentient vehicles, don't you? You can't sell this. You'll be that writer with the talking spaceships/warships/whatever." Maybe that's not so terrible, but I mean, there's many reasons it won't sell. Like:

The focus on legal issues. It was always a political project, but a more... modern political. In fantasy, "political" stories are usually about rulers and wannabe rulers maneuvering around each other. This is more fights between lawyers of merchant families. Because any sufficiently hierarchical and complex society will have lawyer-like figures, but you rarely see them-- seriously, books involving big merchant families never seem to have lawyers. Where... "merchants" are usually their own lawyers/accountants if they can't hire someone to do it for them. That's pretty much all they do. Make contracts with other merchants to move goods from one place to another and distribute them.

It's like in any world involving magic won't have a legal system.

It gets worse the more magic there is, which would make you think you need more legal stuff. Most books will have magic rules-- i.e., black magic is a death sentence-- but it's entirely separate from the civilian law no matter how common magic is.

Now while I study for the bar, I wonder: what would a legal system look like where magic is involved?

If our heroine gets a bad potion from the local hedge witch, can she sue instead of just learning a lesson about how magic doesn't solve your problems? For breach of warranty of merchantability? For pain and suffering?

If a magician has a powerful artifact from Nation Gobbly'Apostrophe, can Gobbly'Apostrophe petition magician's host country to demand it back as a national treasure? Could magician's host country take it back because magician failed to declare it?

What is the liability of a dragon rider? Do they have insurance?

Also wow death sentences! That's harsh. Executing someone-- especially someone as rich/powerful as a wizard-- is going to have major social repercussions. How are their estates handled? When you kill the bad guy, who gets his stuff? His doomsday machine and his vast riches? Does it escheat to the government? Go to his heirs? Finders/keepers? Could the villain's descendents show up and challenge the heroes on their claim for the fantastic trinket?

If you think that's too modern, the descent of property was a huge issue when most fantasy is set. It was, actually, THE issue.

I know that the point of magic isn't to have a lot of rules. But even with wild magic the rest of the world has to take it into account-- which is getting away from my "what does a legal system look like" question and more into "if magic is a part of your world it has to have a tangible impact on that world's development" territory.

But I really want to fiddle with legal systems and magic. Or at least simply the fantastic in law.

And that's probably not why people read fantasy, but whatever. I have questions.

Maybe I should just write a magical courtroom drama and get this out of my system.

*Basically the question is who owns the ships-- the government that commissioned them? Since that government is defunct after their defeat in the war, does it go to the country to be held in trust for the good of the people with the new government as trustee? Does it go to the country where the ships were abandoned? What if a more powerful country decrees that this country isn't capable of safeguarding the ships? Does it go to the finder? I have an anthro degree with lots of archaeology background so I have many feelings on this.