Mad legal practice

As my esteemed colleague Dr. Christophy would no doubt identify, there are overwhelming parallels between the development of the field of physics and that of more social-facing fields, such as law. Before the days of the Disputatious Assembly of Sovereigns, civilization's best shot at physics was knowing that rocks fall back down after you catapult them. Likewise, "law" was doing whatever the king said.

We can follow this trend up to the present day: as civilization developed, the haphazard, ad hoc systems of ancient history were replaced with one regulated by rules and independently verifiable procedure. This paradigm defined the core of legal practice as we know it today.

However, physics encountered a conceptual revolution with the development of quantum mechanics and the grudging acceptance that the old rules might not apply consistently. So, too, has the practice of law undergone a conceptual revolution—one resulting in the field of practice colloquially known as mad law.

The original mad lawyer is widely considered to be Kelsi Hanover, whose Shastrian legal practice had fallen on a run of difficult cases at the time. The final straw was a 894 case in which she had to defend a client who had committed a crime while remote-controlled by future Sovereign Klaus Santanna. This matter dragged the trial into convoluted matters of international law and extradition, further worsened by the fact that the crime was not illegal in the Compass Republic, where Santanna had been at the time of the event. Hanover motioned for a fifteen-day "epiphany recess," which is a common Shastrian practice in cases where one or more participants in a trial receive sudden, urgent inspiration for a brilliant idea. At the end of the recess, Hanover returned with a modal legal framework that applied sections of various laws conditionally and/or hypothetically, allowing the trial to proceed across multiple counterfactuals simultaneously.

(The judge is said to have commented "This is the maddest thing I've ever seen" before acquitting her defendant, thus explaining the name, but that statement is widely considered by scholars to be apocryphal.)

The fundamental insight behind mad law is an essentially memetosociological one—laws do not merely exist and thereby shape society; they must also be enforced and applied to any given circumstance. Consequently, it is necessary to select which laws must apply if you wish them applied; conversely, if you wish no laws applied, all you have to do is fail to apply them. In his journals, St. Stafford wrote that such thinking to him was indispensable in forming his early approach to problems like his adaptation of the rules of horseball or the construction of the Zeitgeist Manipulator.

The practice of mad law has seen greater acceptance in the modern day, but it faces opposition from more traditional lawyers, as well as the Hegemony of Whales, which maintains the whole endeavor is a Flandrean plot.

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Most Honored Pierce Milton

A connection I would emphasize between the development of quantum mechanics and the invention of mad law is that mad law predates quantum theory. As a sociophysicist, I can't help but see a causal connection here. Would it be so far beyond the pale to suggest that quantum mechanics was not developed before mad law because quantum systems did not exist before mad law? Would it be that crazy to suggest that the indeterminacy of the laws of humanity is what gave rise to the indeterminacy of the laws of nature?

Dr. Rubric is telling me that it would be, and she's brandishing her mug rather menacingly, so I must conclude that this requires more thought at another time.

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Dr. Remilion Christophy