Animalia's Justice System

This article is an entry in the citizen-edited encyclopedia Animalopedia. The neutrality of this article is disputed. In particular, over whether the Tribunal belongs in an article on the justice system, an edit war has raged for eleven years on Talk:Animalia's Justice System between the "don't call a criminal syndicate's private punishment 'justice'" camp and the "by caseload, that side is the real mainstream" camp.

Animalia's justice system is characterized by a dual judiciary, in which the aboveground City Court (the Judicial Bureau of Oracle Tower) stands alongside the underground Tribunal (the standing arbitration body for disputes among the Five Families). As the citizens' saying goes: "The straight go to the Court; those in the trade go to the Tribunal."

Overview

The Aboveground Judiciary — the City Court

Structure

It is run by the Judicial Bureau of Oracle Tower, in two tiers: the Summary Courts (one per ward, handling everything from a dispute over a food-stall bill to a squabble between neighbors) and the Central Court (criminal cases and major civil suits). Judges are appointed by the Judicial Bureau, and the criteria for appointment are undisclosed. A skew in the judges' species of origin has long been noted: birds of prey and the long-lived turtle lineages make up sixty percent of all judges (TMA Times, AE 110 justice special).

Features and Criticisms

• Conviction rate: 99.1% — Since the AE 90s, the conviction rate of the Central Court's criminal division has held almost constant in the 99-percent range (Judicial Bureau annual report). The bar association has long explained this as "precision at the indictment stage," but a study collecting the written judgments of the 0.9% of acquittals found a common thread: in the acquittal cases there is "almost no trace that the evidence was ever contested." The legal scholar Swallow Jay (a jay) remarked that it is "as though the answer were decided from the outset, and the courtroom is merely producing a fair copy" (A Stylistics of the Written Judgment, AE 116; the book's publisher went out of business the month after its release).
• The uncanny uniformity of sentencing — Because the variance in sentences across similar cases is statistically far too small, an urban legend persists in legal circles that "the judges are merely reading aloud the output of a sentence-calculating machine." The Judicial Bureau denies it: "Reference materials on going sentencing rates exist, but there is no machine" 〔citation needed〕.
• Speed — On the other hand, proceedings are astonishingly fast, and prolonged pretrial detention is almost unheard of. This point is often cited as a virtue when set against the legal systems of neighboring cities.

How Citizens Actually Use It

For straight citizens, the Court enjoys a certain trust as "the place where the paperwork gets processed correctly." That said, bringing a dispute involving the Five Families before the Court is considered bad form, win or lose, and such cases are withdrawn at an abnormally high rate (Summary Court statistics; reason for withdrawal: "settled between the parties").

The Underground Judiciary — the Tribunal

History

The Five-Family Accord (AE 51) prevented a relapse into open war, but it could not erase the everyday friction over turf, markets, and face. At first each case was judged by an assembly of bosses, but in the search for accumulated precedent and neutrality, a standing arbitration body—the Tribunal—was established in AE 55 (→ TMA-Timeline). In the underworld it is also known simply as "the White Sands."

Composition — the Seven Cushions

Rulings are made by the collective deliberation of seven arbiters.

• Five Family-nominated seats — one nominated by each Family. Active executives may not serve (retired advisor-rank figures are the custom).
• Two neutral seats — chosen by unanimous vote from among those belonging to none of the Five Families. Past holders include a librarian of Echoes Library, a retired monk of Zennin-ji, and the blind goat known as the first neutral arbiter, "the Glass-Eyed Elder."

An arbiter's term is for life. However, "turning the cushion over" (resigning of one's own accord) is permitted. Gifts or threats directed at an arbiter are treated as the gravest violation of the Five-Family Accord; the two cases ever brought were each resolved by the ousting of the offending Family's executives 〔citation needed〕.

Types of Ruling

Notable Rulings

• The Misty Pier Ruling (AE 67; Tribunal Ruling Record No. IX) — A dispute between the Ninkyou-gumi's side and the Tundra Syndicate's side over cargo-handling rights at Fog Port's Third Pier. The ruling "divided the pier by the tides"—an unprecedented arrangement placing the pier under Ninkyou management at high tide and Tundra management at low—and became the prototype for every later "divide by time" solution. To this day the two Families jointly commission the tide tables.
• The Counterfeit-Coin Settlement (AE 89; ibid., No. XLIII) — During the turmoil of the Burrow Panic (→ TMA-Timeline), an insult case in which a Goldfist-affiliated gambling house publicly branded the minted coin of a Hua-Long Hui-affiliated money changer "counterfeit." The ruling was an ironic one, requiring the apology-money to be paid "in the very coin at issue, and by weight rather than face value"; its pronouncement on what, exactly, gives gold its credit came in later years to be cited in economics lectures 〔citation needed〕.
• The White Chrysanthemum Cup-Return (AE 102; ibid., No. LXXVII) — The fourth—and most recent—cup-return in the Tribunal's history. A case in which a subsidiary crew on the Ninkyou side committed violence that ran afoul of the inviolability of the young (Article One of the Accord). The Ninkyou-gumi did not shield them; it brought the matter to the Tribunal itself, and the crew was dissolved upon the return of the cup. The closing line of the written ruling—"It is not the code that protects the Family. It is letting the young see the code kept that protects the Family"—became the most-quoted ruling text in the underworld.

The Form of Procedure

Sessions avoid the new moon 〔citation needed〕, and the seven arbiters sit in a circular arrangement in which each can see the others' faces and yet every one has a wall at his back. The parties surrender their weapons, and testimony is given "with the cup turned down" (perjury counts as a lie sworn upon the overturned cup, and is grounds for excommunication). Records of rulings are kept as documents, but their place of storage is said to be known only to the neutral arbiters, generation to generation.

The Legal Professions — Advocates and Word-Adders

Each of the two judiciaries has bred its own distinct profession of advocacy.

• The Advocate — the lawyer on the City Court side, registered after passing the Judicial Bureau's qualifying examination (pass rate unpublished). Defense work in criminal courtrooms with conviction rates in the 99-percent range is self-deprecatingly called "the job of shaving one rung off the sentence," but in the everyday practice of civil suits, registrations, and out-of-court settlements, Advocates are indispensable to civic life. The Advocates' Guild maintains, in principle, its independence from the Judicial Bureau—though the fact that its guildmaster is elected unopposed every single time is a recurring source of irony 〔citation needed〕.
• The Word-Adder — the informal calling that corresponds to the advocate's profession on the Tribunal side. There is no qualification; one stands on track record and trust alone. On behalf of a party's Family, the Word-Adder organizes the facts and "makes the case hang together" before the arbiters. The pleadings of famous Word-Adders circulate in manuscript and are said to be used as teaching material in the negotiation courses at Nightfall Academy (→ TMA-Education) 〔citation needed〕. Many come from straight backgrounds, and as a rare profession standing on the border between the trade and the straight world, they are never short of dramatists and storytellers to take them as a subject.

The System of Punishments

The punishments the City Court hands down come in four kinds: fines (in AMT), labor, confinement, and banishment from the city. Capital punishment has not existed since the Founding—said to derive from an old internal rule of the Judicial Bureau: "the city does not write a judgment that reduces its own population" 〔citation needed〕.

Distinctive is the "rehabilitation program" operated as an alternative to a term of confinement. Enrollees are released after a "course" of several weeks, and the program is known for an abnormally low recidivism rate (a 90-percent reduction, per the Judicial Bureau annual report). Enrollees themselves are reluctant to say much about its content, repeating, as if stamped from the same die, the impression that "I don't remember it well, but I lost any urge to do wrong." The Administrative Bureau boasts of it as a success story of correction, though some whisper of a connection to the Lunatic Sanatorium 〔by whom?〕 (→ TMA-Underworld).

The "punishments" of the underground judiciary are, as noted, crowned by excommunication and the return of the cup; but what citizens tend to overlook is that the Tribunal's apology-performances and labor-service are designed as service to the residents of the turf. The bridge repairs and festival security ordered by a ruling end up reproducing the Five Families' surrogate governance (→ TMA-Politics).

Choosing Between the Two Judiciaries

In the practice of everyday life, the dual judiciary divides its domains with surprising smoothness.

1. Straight versus straight → the Court (Summary Court)
2. Trade versus trade → the Tribunal (or a settlement between the Families)
3. Straight versus trade → the most delicate territory. Most end in a settlement in which the Family's side "does the right thing." Where a Family will not admit fault, a straight citizen's right to go to Court is guaranteed—yet, curiously, in the records of those trials, the plaintiff's win rate is significantly higher than the average plaintiff win rate at the City Court (Swallow Jay, op. cit.). Among trade folk this is a well-known phenomenon, grumbled about as "the Tower won't let us win."

Legal historians describe Animalia's dual judiciary as "not a defect but a division of labor." Yet in the margin of an old treatise on justice held in Echoes Library, this scribble survives—"It is not that there are two courtrooms. There is one cage, with two doors"〔invalid citation: the book in question has now vanished from the lending records〕.

関連項目

• TMA-Timeline — AE 55 審判院設置、AE 51 五家協定
• TMA-Politics — 司法局と行政局
• TMA-Police — 捜査・執行機関
• TMA-Underworld — 破門者とシャドウ・レイヤー
• TMA-Lore-Deep — 五家協定五箇条
• Oracle-AI