One question that bounced into my head earlier, but seems more appropriate to ask here: When the “Union of Empires” was converted into the “Empire of the Star,” did the constituent empires of Cestia and Selenaria maintain their own legal existence as separate constituent nations, or were they both effectively subsumed to create a new unified Crown much as happened with England and Scotland to form Great Britain in 1707?
Separate constituent nations. If you recall back in Section I, Article VIII, there’s the note about Alphas I and Seledie III passing on their coronargyr/imperium over Cestia and Selenaria respectively to the next rulers of those two Empires. Partly that’s because with the technology of the time (being separated by a decent-sized sea) local authority was needed; partly because they would have been too busy with the issues of the new, larger Empire to give their former nations the necessary attention; and partly because it would have been impossible to avoid giving them some undue preference, which wouldn’t have worked well in a union of (originally) five polities.
I note that there are no provisions here for secession of nations. Oversight, deliberate, or covered elsewhere by other provisions and principles?
That’s an involved enough answer I’m going to put it in a post.
In reference particularly to Article VII: Given that the implicit Right of Free Trade that is universal across the Empire would seem to imply that tariffs, restrictions, and bans on commerce are out, how could one constituent nation meaningfully “smuggle” something into another in the first place?
Well, they can’t any more, technically. But they used to, so this is more of a “and you can all stop that now” clause than anything else. It might also be construable as equivalent to the “transporting X across state lines” laws we have in the US, although the Curia hasn’t seen fit to so construe it yet, and probably won’t.
What sort of items are considered mala in se in the first place?
Anything whose unlawfulness/unethicality arises from its essence, not from its use; i.e., those things which by their nature can have no legitimate use or are themselves “poisoned fruit”, having their origin in (proximate) rights-violations.
nweismuller picks out a couple of the obvious cases of the latter, those being slaves and stolen goods. Knock-offs and pirated data would be another, as products of fraud and unlawful duplication and conveyance, respectively.
Another category, of the former this time, would be Class 2 and 3 Coercive Substances, which have no function other than committing gross choice-theft (which are not limited to the category in that post - a drug that causes immediate and uncontrollable violent insanity, say, is also a Class 3 Coercive Substance).
Other examples follow essentially the same patterns…