Axunemi law

From Almeopedia

Axunemi law is the legal system of ancient Axunai, the forerunner of both Xurno and Čeiy.

Contents 1 Origins 2 Imperial Axunai 3 Procedures 4 Later developments

Origins

Ezičimi notions of law were rudimentary: the geivez or lord of the pešenke (band, later estate) ruled absolutely. He arbitrated disputes among his subjects according to his whim; there was by definition no valid complaint a subject could make against the lord. He was answerable only to the king (nive)— and only if the king was strong enough to demand answers— and to the gods; but the gods were sovereigns much like himself and disapproved only of out-and-out cruelty.

With the conquest of the Wede:i states, the Ezičimi found themselves running highly bureaucratized hydraulic states with developed law codes (sa:unak, going back to the Canons of Respect). The obvious expedient was to keep the bureaucracies but to put an Ezičiz in charge. In effect this meant that Wede:i continued to live under Wede:i rules— though Ezičimi orders could supersede these at any time.

The Ezičimi considered any child of an Ezičiz father to be Ezičimi; this and the custom of taking Wede:i brides led to an explosion in the proportion of the population considered Ezičimi. Only a small portion of these could remain in the ruling class; the rest became bureaucrats, priests, or peasants, and thus increasingly fell under the Wede:i laws on landowning, engineering, religious governance, and criminal conduct.

The Wede:i kings delegated criminal investigation and punishment to their viziers or moganopaźiwan. The nivei retained this idea, leaving judgment of Wede:i citizens to their household (douzi), while judging Ezičimi themselves. Once this became unwieldly, the nivei simply sent lesser Ezičimi to the douzi, which thus became the word for ‘court’.

Imperial Axunai

In the early 900s, the emperor Neičunimi, grandson of Timai, reorganized the imperial government into seven Adjutances (kurtudawi), and with it Axunemi law. The empire believed in codification and uniformity, and Neičunimi's scholars investigated both Wede:i and Ezičimi traditions, carefully melded them, and wrote them down in the emperor's voice. Each Adjutance had its own kezax or legal code, and its own enforcement mechanisms. The engineering and palace adjutances had little legal presence (except regulation of their own property), so there was effectively a fivefold division of law:

• Military order was the responsibility of the army. Normally an officer judged offenses or disputes among his men.
• The priesthood (Jeimiei kurtudai) organized and regulated priests, monks, and teachers. Blasphemy and perversion (e.g. adultery) were referred to the priests to prosecute.
• The fiscal adjutance (Dax loujimexiš) was responsible for taxation as well as trade; it persecuted tax dodgers and policed foreign trade. As a corollary, it handled maritime law (though this was largely based on the traditions of the Jeori, the first maritime power in the south).
• The records adjutance (Zezenuviei kurtudai) registered land ownership, and thus handled disputes over land and questions of inheritance.
• The judiciary (Douzi) handled everything else; this largely meant crime (e.g. murder and theft) as well as general disputes between citizens.

It should be emphasized that all major institutions were under state control, including temples and trade. The only powers beside the Emperor were the nobles (and these were considered subordinates of the king, and indeed often had bureaucratic titles and responsibilities). If a dispute arose or a crime occurred, the first order of business was to find which Adjutance would handle it. Cases that affected more than one Adjutance were a nightmare.

Notable for its absence is law relating to marriage. Marriage was an affair between families, and problems (outside inheritance and land ownership) were referred to the families; if they couldn't agree on a solution, they could ask a priest to mediate. Divorce required direct approval from the emperor.

Procedures

Legal procedure was similar in all adjutances: some official was named judge (midirti), and he had responsibility for investigating the crime, interrogating witnesses, and coming to a judgment. Defendants were normally imprisoned and had no right to representation, or even to be present at their trial. There were no advocates and no separation of prosecutors and judges.

Judges were not a distinct class; a peculiarity of the Axunemi system was that they were simply officials of the adjutances: military officers for military crimes, priests for religious ones, surveyors or registrars for property disputes, and so on. Even in the judiciary, midirtui might have other primary responsibilities— they might be nobles, or might administer prisons or policemen. An advantage of this system was that judges might have broad experience— they didn't need to consult experts, they were the experts. A disadvantage was that they might or might not be familiar with court procedure, the text of the kezax, or precedent. Often they saw nothing wrong with torturing defendants (or witnesses) till they talked, then applying harsh punishments. The general attitude was that anyone on the wrong end of a court case was already guilty... if he wasn't, why was he in court?

Almost all laws were phrased as prohibitions or specifications from the emperor. As a result there was little concept of a civil dispute. If two people had a quarrel, one would denounce the other for committing a crime, which the state could then investigate. Sometimes each could accuse the other, resulting in a vumun orivatus or double crime; given Axunemi attitudes, this was more likely to result in punishment of both parties than in resolution in favor of one disputant. (Knowing this, people used the law as a last resort to solve disputes, preferring to negotiate between families, or using trusted intermediaries.)

The only persons with rights per se were nobles, the imperial family, and high officials of the state itself. Except for the most serious crimes, these had the right to reside in their house while accused (but only in the city where they would be tried); they could hire someone to speak for them; and if their midirti was not himself a noble they could appeal their case to the emperor.

Later developments

Legal codes inevitably become more complex over time. Perhaps ironically, a major difficulty for Axunai was the assumption that its own laws, Neičunimi's kezaki, were perfect and eternal. Even emperors hesitated to change them. If something wasn't covered— say, how to deal with nomads' conception of collective land ownership, or the ramifications of Skourene traders owning houses, or how to handle the burgeoning classes of small non-noble landowners, or urban artists, scholars, and craftsmen)— well, it continued to not be covered.

The gap was partially addressed by precedent (endax)— judges simply looked up the nearest case in the centuries of archives. As a corollary, judges were increasingly specialized, studying both kezax and endax before being assigned cases.

Rights also tended to expand over time, largely by extending nobles' rights to their families, and officials' to lower orders in the bureaucracy. As nobles' rights extended to the third generation, even for minor titles, quite a few people could claim the rights of nobles, and this of course caused resentment among those who could not.

Judges grew increasingly corrupt. When the empire was strong, bribery was prosecuted by the secret police (part of the Fiscal Adjutance), but this weakened in the late empire.

After the fall of the empire (1682), the successor kingdoms attempted to maintain their pieces of the bureaucracy, with mixed success. If a city was conquered it was expected to follow the laws of the new king, but of course it generally had no access to the new land's legal archives, and all too often records were lost in the wars anyway. The remoter states partially reverted to simpler systems where the king and his household administered all justice; the more sophisticated states in the delta and Šuzep (the central Xengi) maintained more of the imperial system. Some of these experimented with new principles and procedures inspired by Endajué; but this belongs to the history of Xurnese law.

The final blow was the Gelyet invasion (2476-83). The conquerors refused to let Axunemi courts operate, perceiving them as a threat to their authority. They prosecuted some crimes themselves— especially crimes against Gelyet— but Axunemi law bored them, and the Axunemi were not eager to appeal to the conquerors anyway. Civil law essentially was put on hold till the rise of Xurno.