Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Tuesday, 19 February 2002

# 11:30 PM

Wrote some more Shadowrun spells: static and dynamic magnetic fields, more sleep magic, and more Oliver Sacks-inspired illusions.

# 3:30 PM

It's been raining off and on for the past week; today it seems to have settled down to rain in earnest. I like a good gentle rainy day. The soft gray light makes everything seem friendlier, somehow. The mist brings the horizon closer. Things nearer than the mist somehow seem sharper, probably by contrast. Noises are muffled.

I walked through Sproul Plaza on the way back from class and saw that someone had decided to dump bubble bath liquid in the fountain for a joke. It wasn't real impressive, though.

today's dose of philosophizing

It occurred to me earlier today that the forms and procedures of a criminal trial have interesting resemblances to magical ritual. Two things in particular come to mind: the goal being to determine an absolute Truth (who is guilty of a crime) by inquiring of witnesses, and the unusual powers given to the judge as representative of the state. (Under normal circumstances, ordering that someone be locked up for the rest of their life is itself a criminal act.)

This is not surprising when you consider that most modern criminal procedure is based on protocols developed in solidly religious—mostly solidly Christian—cultures and times. Most religions do include the concept of absolute truth, and the spectrum from religion to magic is well understood in anthropology.

With my speculative-fiction hat on, there are two ways one could run with this observation. One, let's call it the "Ken MacLeod direction", would be to explore the nature of a legal system that didn't have any basis in magic or religion. Instead, it might take an approach similar to scientific method, with experiments done to probe the scene of a crime for what happened. More emphasis would be placed on preventing crime than punishing it. Punishments would focus on compensating the victim, probably with money (weregild, anyone?)

The other possibility, the "Jo Walton direction", would be to explore a legal system overtly and explicitly based on magic principles. Here, you'd investigate a crime with rituals intended to extract truth from suspects and witnesses, and punishments might have a direct effect on the state of the criminal's soul.