M. J. Young
12-19-2006, 12:28 PM
I am rather disappointed that my article I'm Not a Lawyer, but I Play One in a Game seems to have disappeared from the RPGnet database (and the more so because I do not have a copy of it). However, I am going to point to a series of three articles I did some years back on the subject over at Places to Go, People to Be which you might find useful, under the main title Law and Enforcement in Imaginary Realms. The first, The Source of Law (http://ptgptb.humbug.org.au/0009/law01.html), deals with how laws are made and how government systems work, to some degree. The Course of Law (http://ptgptb.org/0010/law2.html) concerns legal processes, arrests, rights of the accused, standards of proof, the nature of evidence, and appeals. Finally, in The Force of Law (http://ptgptb.org/0011/law3.html) covers punishments, particular the justifications for it and the types of punishments that flow from those various justifications.
Someone has already mentioned on another thread that the real difference is between English Common Law and Roman Civil Law (best exemplified, from what I understand, by France). The American courts consider all English case law prior to the American Revolution as precedent, and build on it. Of course, statutory law is very different, but the relative authority of statutory law versus precedent is often unclear.
I hope this helps.
And if anyone has a copy of my old article that vanished, I would very much like to have it. To refresh memories, it listed ten simple principles of the nature of law that would make it possible for people completely clueless about actual law to play lawyers in a role playing game. I'd love to restore them to my library.
Thanks.
--M. J. Young
Someone has already mentioned on another thread that the real difference is between English Common Law and Roman Civil Law (best exemplified, from what I understand, by France). The American courts consider all English case law prior to the American Revolution as precedent, and build on it. Of course, statutory law is very different, but the relative authority of statutory law versus precedent is often unclear.
I hope this helps.
And if anyone has a copy of my old article that vanished, I would very much like to have it. To refresh memories, it listed ten simple principles of the nature of law that would make it possible for people completely clueless about actual law to play lawyers in a role playing game. I'd love to restore them to my library.
Thanks.
--M. J. Young