I’ve been rereading the Charter posts and ran across this section in The Imperial Charter: Section Four:
SECTION IV: NATIONS OF THE EMPIRE
Article I: On Sovereignty
This Charter guarantees the local sovereignty of nations of the Empire underneath the overall sovereignty of the Empire. No interference with local law or custom is contemplated, except where such local law or custom is in conflict with Imperial law.
What are some examples of local laws that are not in conflict with Imperial law?
Er, I think one canonical example is the Thanedom of Darazik
Heh, fair, but I was really wondering about things other than eccentric local governance structures.
Hm… I think another possible would be odocorps having conlegial authority to declare on which side of the road you drive on, but I don’t think that quite counts as local sovereignty of constituent nations.
Unfortunately, most of these (in the modern day) really are about local governance structures (eccentric or otherwise; Darazik’s kenothronism, and indeed those of Glennén and Syndal; Eävalle’s auction; et. al.).
Historians argue about how much this qualifies as a “just as planned”, or not, but it can’t be denied that in the years after the Great Convention (devised 502-526, constituting a universal legal code) was promulgated - the Universal Commerce Code having arrived on the scene a couple of centuries earlier - the vast bulk of both criminal and commercial law were harmonized.
It also didn’t help much that a lot of what we might consider local laws and ordinances were conveniently kicked over into the realm of property rights and contracts. (If a citysteader has a particular vision for Ameri, or Chanayíma, or Chresytíäné, or Máhadenel, it’s easy enough to phrase that as a specialized property right in aesthetics.)
Some of them are effectively permissible carve-outs from more general laws. While anharmonic indecency is the general legal means of telling people to put on a damn shirt, etc., when wandering through public volumes¹, the Cyrsan islands - and other regions of Makaé-lin culture, such as Clajdíä (Thirteen Colonies) - revise this such that it can only be used to tell people to put on some damn pants. On similar cultural grounds, Paltraeth and its daughter worlds make it clear that the traditional kaeth body-check-as-greeting, etal., isn’t legal battery even if it feels like it.
That said, there are others. That also said, I don’t have a definitive list handy, alas, But one that did come to mind is this:
A large chunk of the nation of Palar lives in floating sky cities, so they have local laws concerning shoving, overcrowding, and suchlike that are much more toothsome than standard Imperial laws, because people might fall a long damn way. (Such were later cross-ported to the cloud coral islands of Torachal and the floatstone skymotes of Calríäkay.)
As I think of more, I shall try and remember to post them.
Incidentally, while JHPrime is correct here:
And conlegiality isn’t an example of this, the authors of the conlegius statutes were inspired by the same fundamental principle.
I could see local laws being made about interactions with local wildlife, especially of the “you can do [z] with all wildlife except [y]” sort, or other specific circumstance ones. In many cases making it a law would mostly serve as a way to catch and inform visitors who were unaware, I suspect, and gently correcting behaviour that way.
Real world example: in many parts of far north-eastern Australia, people are forbidden from leaving out fruit for cassowaries, because this lures them into urban environments where they are more likely to get hit by cars or encounter dogs. (Cars are currently the largest cause of death to cassowaries, followed by dogs attacking younger birds.) However, after a large cyclone has been through, it knocks down a lot of wild fruits and in many areas there’s no longer enough rainforest for the birds to migrate to an unaffected area. So in the immediate aftermath, some towns WILL feed cassowaries for a few weeks to months while the local plants recover.
So an example of a local law might be on the permitted feeding schedule of the resident avian megafauna to ensure harmonious coexistence.
Thanks, those examples are more like what I was looking for. In retrospect, I think what I was really trying to ask was something like “Given the Empire’s ethical system, how much room is there for variation in legality (or severity of punishment)?” The answer seems to be “a non-trivial amount, but still not much”.