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Episode 14: I Fought the Lawmage
108 Plays6 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast!
In our fourteenth episode, the guys get together with former law clerk Scott Peitzer (a.k.a. The Booze Cube) to unwrap the many layers of convoluted Ravnican law in the lead-up to the fall Magic: the Gathering expansion "Guilds of Ravnica".
Have a parking ticket for your wolf steed? Got a disorderly conduct citation from the last Rakdos kegger? Did you go into a Simic health clinic for a simple sniffle and come out with a few extra limbs? The law firm of Booze, Redemann, Q., and Newman is here to help, as they pick apart the obstinate Azorius Senate, the opportunistic Orzhov Syndicate, and the belligerent Boros Legion and their roles in Ravnica's justice system.
Remember: at 300 followers on Twitter, we'll do our next giveaway, so keep the word of mouth going!
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Joe Redemann at @Fyndhorn, Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @AlexanderNewm. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter or GoblinLorePodcast@gmail.com.
Goblin Lore is proud to be a member of the Geek Therapy Network (on Twitter at @GeekTherapy).
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art courtesy of Greg Staples, design by Joe Redemann.
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Transcript
Introduction to Ravnica's Law Magic
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lore. In this episode, we talk to Scott Peitzer, better known as the Booze Cube, about his understanding of law magic on the plane of Ravnica, specifically in context of the Azorius, Orzhov, and Boros guilds. We were super lucky to have Scott on for this podcast, and we got to learn a lot about the way the legal system in the real world works. Without any further ado, let's get to the show.
Understanding Ravnica's Laws for Tourists
00:00:38
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lore. This episode we are talking about Ravnica once more. It is return to return to Ravnica season and we're helping you learn how to be a good tourist to the plane of Ravnica and one of the things you need to know when you go to any new plane
00:00:58
Speaker
is the laws. You need to understand what to do and what not to do when you get to your new interplanar locality. And so we have a special guest coming on this episode to talk to us about just that. But before we get to the description of the Ravnican legal system, we're going to have all of our hosts and guests introduce themselves.
Speculating Ravnica Crimes
00:01:20
Speaker
And I want you to tell the listeners what crime you might be caught for
00:01:34
Speaker
kind of think of myself as a pretty active person. And I really hate the guild structure, which is going to be something that we're going to get into later on. So I think that I am probably going to get arrested for helping lead the guild list in a revolt against the Ravnican guilds. I mean, I think pretty simply, it's going to be me alongside Cranko. I'm on Twitter, Alexander Newham. I'm Alex Newman. And mine is much less political and more
00:01:49
Speaker
if you ever made it to Ravnica.
00:02:02
Speaker
goofy, because that's kind of my speed. To just, just to paint a picture here. So Hello Fountain, the art from Return to Ravnica, this wonderful fountain in the middle. It's got these great waterfalls coming down these, these wonderful sort of curved buildings. I suspect that if I found myself on Ravnica, wandering around, I might get arrested trying to make a water slide out of one of those things.
00:02:30
Speaker
This is why I like working with Alex. He is so pure and just like child, like in a great, beautiful way because I thought he was going to say public urination. That might be mine. I'm Scott Peitzer, also known as the Booze Cube on Twitter and creator of the drinking game of the same. I'm going to go really arcane here and say that I would probably be
00:03:00
Speaker
caught for barretry which is a common law offense where it's uh you're basically for bringing repeated repeated litigation for the purposes of profit or harassment so i mean i would obviously be an advocate in rafnica but i think i would get a lot of pleasure out of just
00:03:25
Speaker
Just tying up the Boros Legion and Selesnya in court for his son and prophet. And I'm your host, Joe Rademann. You can find me on Twitter at Finhorne. And I think I would get arrested for summoning an entire pack of Thunderheads and commanding them all to scream at the top of their lungs, show me what you got. Oh, my gosh.
00:03:52
Speaker
We're mixing Rick and Morty in here too, baby. I would probably arrest you for that myself. This little dabble into the darker side of the law is the other half of what we're talking
Need for Magical Legal System
00:04:09
Speaker
about today. We're going to talk a little bit about the flavor of Ravnica and its legal system. So the first thing we wanted to sort of
00:04:17
Speaker
jump into is the history of law magic on Ravnica. So what is it about Ravnica that makes it so important to have a magical legal system? Boos, you're our legal expert here so why don't you take the first crack at that? Sure, I think the most obvious thing is that you have a lot of people living in a relatively small space so you've got a high population density
00:04:42
Speaker
Which means people are going to be getting, stepping on each other's toes. And that's, at a fundamental level, what law really needs to be able to do is prevent, get the Hobbesian Leviathan to keep life from being nasty, brutish and short. Wait, did you just call me brutish and short?
00:05:00
Speaker
Well, I just caught me short. I mean, it's from a flavor perspective and a story perspective, it is the city plane. It's the most sort of social civilization based plane, I think, that we've seen in Magic the Gathering. It's the most sort of modern in that sense. You know, we have places like Mirrodin or Kaladesh, which are a little more sci-fi-y, but this is the most
00:05:26
Speaker
It seems like it's the closest to our time in a believable sort of way does that sort of make sense? And so it seems like they're you know, there need to be those same sort of social systems in place Yeah, it's it's less Technologically like the real world as you're saying Kaladesh is a little closer to that But I think in the structure of society like Scott said there's a lot more people in Ravnica so there's bigger cities and even if the cities are
00:05:52
Speaker
look more medieval European than our cities do, the actual population density and thus social fabric of those cities is going to be a lot closer to ours because you need that structure to manage that many people that close together.
00:06:10
Speaker
Let's go to history section here. This is all the backstory.
Guild Pact as Social Contract
00:06:14
Speaker
We touched on this a little bit in the last episode where we mentioned, Alex and I mentioned Azor and the beginning of the guild pact. So broad terms, the guild pact was the
00:06:28
Speaker
social contract. It was the magical social contract that bound all of Ravnica. And it was signed by the original ten paroons or founders of the guilds and was instituted and sort of put into place by Azor, the Sphinx planeswalker who we later found out in the Ixalan story is kind of a dick. But so Azor had that guild pack put into place and for
00:06:54
Speaker
Thousands of years it was followed to a tee if any guild stepped out of line the magic of the guild pack that bound the plane pulled them back into line and enacted punishments and repercussions eventually at the Festival of the guild packed. I believe it was it was
00:07:13
Speaker
30,000th or something, some ridiculous number, where they celebrated this peace and all the, you know, joy of having a sustained magical society. One of the Boros Wojciechs, the the law enforcement officer's Agris Kos, arrested Sadek, the head of House Demir, exposing House Demir to the public,
00:07:35
Speaker
this was back when they were secret, generating a loophole in the guild pact that the demirate planned on exploiting and breaking the guild pact and then all hell broke loose and when people weren't bound by this magical law they started to do whatever they want because they hadn't done that and it was
00:07:55
Speaker
super nuts for a while until a new guild pack was created by Tezakarlov, one of the Orzhov. It was not backed up by metaphysical magic or anything like that, so guilds took any chance they could to exploit it.
00:08:10
Speaker
But eventually in the Return to Ravnica block, Jace Balerin, through the magic of Azor's Maze, or the Dragon's Maze, our favorite set of that block, became the new living guild pack. He was imbued with the magic of the guild pack, which there was a failsafe apparently put in by Azor in case the guild pack was ever broken. Well, I mean, to be fair, you always have a failsafe. I mean, I don't know about your plans, but mind you,
00:08:41
Speaker
Well, that's a good point to jump off from, I guess, for our lawyer in residence here. How possible is it to have a small single event like this, like the arrest of Zadek and the exposure of the Demir, generate a loophole that dissipates an entire system of law? Is that really possible? Yeah, I think that's very possible. And it's actually something in real life that we have to worry about right now.
00:09:09
Speaker
I think the better way to understand the guild pack is not a contract, but rather as a constitution, as a foundational document or magical set of rules or however it written down. If something goes against, you know, fundamentally against the how that structure is supposed to work, you have a constitutional crisis, which is basically what happened at the end of the
00:09:35
Speaker
Ravnica novels. Yeah, I mean, like, for example, like, let's say today you had the executive branch refused to just straight up refuse to enforce a judicial decree. We would have the same kind of thing here. Well, and I mean, I think one thing that's kind of interesting, Scott, is, you know, we're we you talk about the constitutional crisis. I mean, we we theoretically have
00:09:59
Speaker
a process in place to amend or to change it. Because we agreed at some point, and I know that we've struggled with this in recent years to understand that the Constitution is a living document.
00:10:12
Speaker
it is something that can theoretically be changed. I'm not saying that it should be willy-nilly, but we do have this recognition that 2018 is not the same as the 1700s. Now, we're talking about a guild pack that Azor put into place that
00:10:30
Speaker
We're talking did ace were it's just this interesting thing Did he actually leave us basically without you know, is there a way to amend this thing? It basically is like we have a constitutional crisis that the only kind of way to resolve is not actually through the legal system but through A deus ex machina type thing and basically jace is the living guilt pack It's it's um articles of consideration a little bit
00:10:59
Speaker
a system that didn't work and then we had to write an entirely new system that could be changed so that we had something that could work going forward. His system, if it didn't, in fact, have a way to change. It's a rigid thing. It's like skyscrapers are built to move with the wind a little bit. They're meant to bend just a little so that they don't break in the wind. And his system didn't have a way to change right over
00:11:29
Speaker
that period of time, people in societies are going to change. They're going to change each other and they're going to be changed. And if that system of law doesn't have a way to change with it, well, we see it snap like it did at the end of the Francisco City of Guilds storyline.
Azorius and Power Concentration
00:11:45
Speaker
So bringing this back to kind of where we are on Ravnic at this point, then. Why don't we talk a little bit about how those responsibilities were delineated in the in the Guild Pact? So I sort of preface before, but let's go kind of one by one. The Azorius are the Blue-White Guild. What purpose do they fill in society, though? And how does that relate to to the real world for us? Well, the Azorius are they're almost a complete a complete government because you have
00:12:13
Speaker
you know, the size of the triangle stand for the three columns, which are basically the three branches, you've got the judicial branch in there, you've got the legislative branch that makes the laws, and then they have an arm for enforcing it, so which is the executive. So it's, it's almost a complete government into itself, which you know, creates problems because it's, I mean, I don't know how, how much rivalry there is between those three columns, but
00:12:44
Speaker
You know, it's it's still all Azorius when it comes down to it. Right. I mean, we end up with basically a legal system that, quote unquote, has the checks and balances, but all within the same group in some ways. If we're thinking of the guilds of these separate organizations that are going to come into conflict, it's kind of like. Basically, the Azorius can sit back and kind of be like, yeah, we'll take care of any disputes and all three of our branches agree with each other.
00:13:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's a stable system, but it's not exactly a good stable system. I mean, the Azorius, I mean, all over the flavor text, it's all about keeping things the way they are, doing nothing. It does seem a very insular governmental system that can be problematic. Yeah, you've got the system where if they really are the only ones making laws, the only ones with that say, the other nine guilds don't seem to have a seat at the table then.
00:13:44
Speaker
I mean, they all have their niche within society, their thing that they get to do. But if it's all regulated by the Azorius. Yeah, I mean, I, I see the other guilds more analogous, I
Orzhov's Role in Legal Representation
00:13:57
Speaker
mean, compared to the real world, kind of as executive agencies, like the, so Lesney is the Department of the Interior, or,
00:14:11
Speaker
Golgari is the Department of Agriculture combined with, you know, waste and management. You know, the interesting thing, though, too, is if you look at it that way, at least in the real world, you have a doctrine of judicial deference when reasonable to
00:14:28
Speaker
the decision-making power of the expertise of an individual agency. And the agency, of course, in the real world, gets to create its own regulations within the confines of the enabling statutes. So theoretically, the Azorius could create some body, not a guild, but some function that needs to be filled, delegated to the Golgari. And they can determine independently within the confines of that
00:14:57
Speaker
directive, how to actually accomplish it in practice. There's really no way to, say, declare a law unconstitutional, at least without dissolving the guilt back. Which apparently is the easiest solution. I mean, so what I heard was open revolution is really the only way to go. Or you have to dissolve Chase, right? An acid?
00:15:23
Speaker
Alright, so let's talk about the Orzhov and how they function in the legal system. So how do the Orzhov function in Ravnican justice?
00:15:37
Speaker
Yours of are the advocates or in other words, the lawyers. I love the fact that the lawyers are black white because it's just it's so on flavor. The adversarial system and the common law system really, because common law is the accretion of doctrine in individual cases.
00:15:56
Speaker
with each party pursuing their own interests and butting heads directly and against each other. Each one is trying to make a very zealous but one-sided case and let the judge figure out where the cards really lie. I always run into this as somebody who definitely doesn't identify with black in the color pie myself. The Orzhov aren't necessarily unscrupulous. Some are, but the Orzhov advocates specifically are
00:16:24
Speaker
They're just taking the position of their client and leading the case however it makes sense for their client. Is that right? Yeah, basically. The black side of it is in order to get the best law, you've got to have each side arguing as hard as they can in their own selfish position in order to present the judge with the best case to make the best ruling. That's a big part of black's color identity that
00:16:52
Speaker
Each person is in the best position to look out for themselves. And when you extend that into black-white, black-white tends to be very much about the loyalty to the group, the loyalty to those that they define as theirs. And in the case of a lawyer, then they're very much about what is the best for the person I am representing.
00:17:15
Speaker
I am fascinated too by how the Orzhov as a group, like you said, I love the term gangster religion, but that is what they are, they're a series of cartels, they're all sorts of different
00:17:31
Speaker
mobs basically that all unite under this and then also sort of have a legitimate front? I mean, it is basically like the whole Al Capone gang or something, you know? That the legitimate front is the advocates and the representation in the legal system and some of the money lending and loaning they do.
00:17:54
Speaker
But then there's all this dark stuff underneath, and so, you know, how do you reconcile that as somebody who does have personal experience in the legal system, how do you reconcile that representation of the prosecutors themselves being that directly woven into, I guess, the money of Ravnica's economy as well?
00:18:15
Speaker
Well, I mean, unfortunately, in the real world, access to justice is often a function of how much you can pay for legal fees. And, you know, there's, of course, organizations that do things pro bono. And a lot of the large firms, too, actually have pro bono requirements. But yeah, for the most part, it's, you know, if you are poor, you're going to have a hard time
00:18:36
Speaker
suing a large corporation. My wife previously at her old job used to do mass tort, which is basically, you know, you're there, basically they just sued Pfizer and the other bit, basically they sued big pharma for a living. But you had these, the only way to do it economically was to have these massive consolidated litigations, kind of like a class action, although technically different.
00:19:04
Speaker
because class actions don't really work anymore. So you have to have a ton of plaintiffs in order to make enough of an incentive for the attorneys, for good attorneys to take on their case and take on the, especially on the plaintiff side, you have to spend a lot of money in order to just to litigate the case. You could literally be spending millions of dollars in expert fees. And if you don't win the case,
00:19:33
Speaker
That's not coming back. Are the Orzhov more like these, the law firms are going to take on Pfizer and be constantly filing suits or are we talking something that they're more along the lines of like ambulance chasers? I think it's a mixture of the two. I mean, it's kind of like, I'd say like when the Orzhov's financial interests coincide with the financial interests of a given client,
00:20:01
Speaker
than they're probably more than happy to take on the case. But unless there's some advantage in it for them going to the black side of them,
00:20:14
Speaker
Maybe they just give it to the, for training, to the associate who just graduated from Orzhov Advocate School. Well, it does make, actually make me think of how Taza handled the drafting of the new guild pact. The new guild pact was brokered by the Orzhov, basically, the non-magical one, prior to Jace being the living guild pact. And that saw the...
00:20:41
Speaker
That saw the Orzhov take on a much larger role, I think, in helping to shape the future of Ravnica and do some of that control that the Azorius had done previously. Teza, I think, saw that opportunity to not only help the greater good, sort of the white element of the Orzhov, but also to boost up her own family and her own guild's influence.
00:21:09
Speaker
Does that sort of fit what you're talking about? Oh yeah, absolutely. It's like, um, you know, like at my wife's old firm, they do really good work. They're the, they're, they're the people that actually hold the big pharmaceutical companies to account for their actions when they hurt people. But at the same time, they're not going to take on a case that is not going to make them a ton of money.
00:21:35
Speaker
So we talked about some of the mechanics that we get from the Azorius, things like Detain, that really do fit with the flavor of their lost side of it. But what's interesting is between the two different Ravnica and Returned Ravnica, the Orzhov actually get mechanics that really do not feel on flavor for the lawyers or for the advocates. I mean, you could extort, you know, as a... That may fit other flavor of the guilt, too. That might fit more of their banking,
00:22:20
Speaker
That's fair. That's fair. I do have to ask too, Scott. So Alex, you bring up a great point that the Orzhov's contracts specifically have almost all of them have writers in them that say you still owe after death and they can basically claim your ghost, your spirit, and prevent you from moving on to the afterlife if you still owe a debt and use you in service.
00:22:29
Speaker
more of their, I mean, they are literally called the Orzhov Syndicate. It fits a little more of that Syndicate nature of them too, I think.
00:22:49
Speaker
How legal is that? Or is there any precedent for that in the real world? That's pretty grim. Well, you know, I've actually had a, uh, I think I've tweeted about this before is that the law takes a very, it just ignores the undead for some reason. I don't understand why, but, uh, you know, there's a lot of questions like, let's say you turn into a vampire. Can you probate your estate to yourself? Huh? And, uh,
00:23:16
Speaker
Well, of course, in the real world, the undead aside, you do have that sort of thing where creditors can make claims on your estate. And so you do have those debts then literally follow you to the grave. Wow. Yep. I also love the Orzov's contract interpretation. One of my favorite flavor text is execution or swing.
00:23:41
Speaker
which is the contract, you know, the contract specified an appendage for a mixed payment. Read the fine print, the head is an appendage. So we now sort of see the landscape of what happens in the courtroom, but somebody's got to enforce it.
Boros Guild's Ambiguous Role
00:24:00
Speaker
Somebody has to be out on the streets actually making sure these rules are followed. And so we need to talk about the borrows. They're our third
00:24:09
Speaker
Law Guild on Ravnica, and actually until you mentioned them, Scott, in our prep and our show notes, I didn't think of them as law, but they absolutely are. So what do the Boros do on Ravnica to function in the justice system? You know, I think that's a really interesting question, one that I'm not entirely sure because the Azorius themselves have a law enforcement wing. So you've got to assume that the Boros are doing something
00:24:39
Speaker
different than how they're enforcing the law than the Azorius are. And I think it's kind of difficult. I mean, they seem like they'd step on each other's toes a lot. I think it would be similar to like a federal bureau versus like the FBI versus the more local police forces.
00:25:03
Speaker
does seem like they're a little more of the paramilitary side of law enforcement as opposed to the simple the bailiffs or even your I guess your
00:25:19
Speaker
parking attendant sort of people, you know, that seems to be a little more of the part and parcel for the Azorius, or the standard like, walk the beat on the street type of person. They're all, they all, the Boros seem almost like the SWAT team that you call in when things get really out of hand. I found some interesting flavor text that might kind of help delineate between them and the Azorius. Like on a Court Street denizen, it says, the Boros fight for justice, the Azorius fight for law.
00:25:49
Speaker
I don't know why I'm between and make sure the people are given both. But it's interesting because the Boros, you know, in Angelic Edict, it says the Boros built a prison in the sky where Azoria statutes couldn't restrict their sense of justice, which is almost kind of like a black site, I guess. So yeah, we have Gitmo on. Yeah.
00:26:13
Speaker
Let's move on to a real world discussion then. So the reason that I kind of brought that up is because we are kind of struggling here with the limited information that we do have on who is our police force with boots on the ground versus what is the Boros kind of doing, whether they are our SWAT teams or they are our National Guard. When do they get called in? But it also paints for me in the fact that they could just be our military and in some ways
00:26:43
Speaker
This is going to get very political, but it's going back to what I first saw when we hit Ferguson. One of the first things that I remember about that was the fact that we started seeing that US military equipment was being sold to police forces around the US. We actually had situations where these small towns basically had miniaturized tanks that had been used for the military in combat zones.
00:27:11
Speaker
I actually saw at that point, there was a lot of articles that were coming out by veterans that were commenting on the fact that tactics that were being used by the military, I'm sorry, by the police forces were tactics that were actually designed to escalate situations, not deescalate them. I've been seeing a militarization of our police force throughout the US, where like I said, you have these small towns making purchases of surplus military gear that's more than any
00:27:41
Speaker
police force should need or I believe really need to have to be able to do their job. And I'm wondering if we're seeing that with the Boros and it could be that they really are supposed to be the police force. They've just been really militarized. I personally have said this as a conspiracy theory. I made a joke about it at the very beginning of the cast with me getting arrested for helping the guild list.
00:28:06
Speaker
But being our third time on Ravnica, you have people that, you know, we know the guilds only make up a certain portion of the populace. And we've now seen them under an original guild pack, a revised guild pack that also has this living planeswalker thing that nobody knows what it is involved with it. I think we are getting close to rioting. I really do. I actually would personally love to see the story go in that direction.
00:28:34
Speaker
and move away from the guilds or more to what happens to the guilds. Because we've talked about this on previous episodes, especially when we profiled Cranko, that there is a divide between the guilds and the guildless. And if they've been living under Azorius law, that they feel that cannot be changed since they control, like Scott was saying, basically all three arms of the government. If the Boros is the military force, but it's also the police force, we're seeing a militarization of it.
00:29:04
Speaker
That's where we're heading.
00:29:22
Speaker
so sort of while just staying on the boros and how they're reflected in the real world first i do think that is a really important thing that that we need to talk about and that we've seen in our own city all of us are from minneapolis area and i mean just a couple of years ago there were
00:29:44
Speaker
There were police shootings. I mean there are police shootings that happen every year But there was a specific police shooting that happened and one of the North Minneapolis Police Department districts was protested outside of not violently not any sort of way and it feels awful that I have to
00:30:02
Speaker
I feel like I have to clarify that. It was not any sort of demands or the public was being disrupted or any sort of thing like that. It was people standing outside and camping outside of this precinct demanding to know what happened. It was the family of this young man that was shot and killed. It was friends in the community. It was people who just wanted the police officers
00:30:32
Speaker
uh chest camera video to be released and that was eventually broken up i if i remember right and they all blur together unfortunately but that was broken up with tear gas which is you know that's some 1960s you know breaking up the civil rights movement type
00:30:53
Speaker
action, you know, there are still marches and Civil acts that are broken up by police forces in the in the US today with fire hoses and just these outsized Responses and now I know this isn't exactly your territory Scott because you're more in the
00:31:15
Speaker
law legal aspect, but since they are an element of the legal system, that's kind of why we're bringing this in to this part of the discussion.
Challenges in Legal Accountability
00:31:24
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a problem with police accountability. Unfortunately, at the moment, it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot that we can do about it. I mean, you can sue a police department, but there's all kinds of immunities that you have to get over, and privileges too.
00:31:46
Speaker
It's just, it's a really tough thing. And short of a complete overhaul, probably at the federal level, it's probably not going to happen. I mean, you might see it in individual states, but like, for example, Minnesota recently got rid of the horrible practice of
00:32:08
Speaker
civil forfeitures where an officer can take your property if you're just suspected of a crime. And it doesn't even have to be a reasonable suspicion.
00:32:18
Speaker
They can just take it, and then you basically have to prove that the property was not being used in the commission of a crime, even if you're, say, acquitted of a crime. It's like that card, was it Render Silent earlier? I mean, it's basically a lot like that, where you don't really have due process. And that's a problem all over the country, except for individual states, like Minnesota, that have gotten rid of it, where you need, say, a criminal conviction to seize property.
00:32:48
Speaker
unless you're doing it at the federal level, you're not going to have a systemic solution. Something too that we've seen exploited a fair amount in regards to this that does link in the rest of the legal system is the grand juries. I think I can see where you're getting at. The first thing you have to understand is that a grand jury, it's a jury, but it's not
00:33:16
Speaker
for conviction it's the if you it's to generate an indictment and it's more of an investigative tool because it allows the prosecutor to subpoena witnesses and require them to to appear and give testimony or present documents or whatever but ultimately the question for the jury is whether there's probable cause here
00:33:44
Speaker
And probable cause is not a high standard, which is one of the things that I find so troubling about this thin blue line here where you see a lot of police officers get off through a grand jury. Right. I think that's been one of the frustrations from an outsider watching. And I'm glad that you're on here, Scott, to talk to us about kind of the fact that this doesn't seem to make sense is
00:34:05
Speaker
To me, I've always been under this assumption of like, we're not even getting to trial. I mean, that's where we were say with Ferguson is you're telling us there's not even enough to go to trial. Like there's not even enough to do that. And it, it seems from an outsider, this is like a low bar that you should use a bar. I mean, it's not, it's not to the ground, but it's still a pretty low bar. I mean,
00:34:31
Speaker
you basically just have to have almost a facially valid case where you're not looking at the truth of the individual facts so much as whether there are enough facts that if they are believed, you could support each element of the crime. What I imagine is happening in the case with police officers is that they're basically police officers acting in the line of duty have a certain amount of leeway
00:35:01
Speaker
And they're just kind of, rather than leaving it for the jury at trial to decide, just saying, well, there's not even enough of that with the leeway. And I think it expands that leeway beyond what really is reasonable. So if we're thinking about this from even the perspective of, say, the Azorius, I mean, I've heard it is kind of that problematic thing that you have prosecutors who are having to prosecute the people that they also kind of expect to bring them
00:35:31
Speaker
you know, to bring in the criminals. They may reach the right answer, but it's not intuitive with the public sense of justice. Kind of like the conflict between Boros and Azorius, where the Boros kind of want to do justice, even if it's outside the law. And the Azorius want absolute law, that the law is infallible in some ways. Right. And I think to have a society
00:35:54
Speaker
you have to have something of both where you need flexible laws. Not so flexible that there might as well not exist, but just enough fuzziness that you can maneuver. And you know, the founders intended it to be flexible. I mean, I think it was, I forget if it was Marbury v. Madison or McCulloch v. Maryland, but really early, early, early cases in deciding the scope of the constitution where they, you know, they just say,
00:36:25
Speaker
It's a constitution that we're expounding. There's supposed to be a certain vagueness for it to withstand the test of time because it has to be able to be expanded and adapted to changing circumstances. I mean, it has built into it a mechanism by which you can modify it. Well, even aside from that, I mean, the real modification you see most frequently is through the courts, because the courts are fleshing out, you know, let's take a clause like,
00:36:53
Speaker
Do process everyone's entitled to do process. Well, what do you mean by process and what is do what does that mean or, you know, that's where you carve out exceptions, say, for example, to the First Amendment.
00:37:07
Speaker
The right to free speech is not entirely unlimited. There are categories of speech that are outside of the courts of rule. They're outside of its scope. Like, for example, fighting words or yelling fire in a movie theater. Yeah, exactly.
Future of the Guild Pact
00:37:22
Speaker
So, OK, so what's the I don't one thing I really want to know with Jace right now, what happens when he's not on Ravnica? Like, how does Ravnica in society like the guilt packing in the constitution has left the building?
00:37:38
Speaker
I believe a day on Ravnica where Jace is not there is just called Tuesday. At least that's my understanding based on the recent stories. It seems like he's never actually there. What happens when he dies? Do they have to have a new maze? Maybe we're going to find out. That's a serious question that hopefully they actually address. What is his job? I think they talked about it a little bit in Origins,
00:38:07
Speaker
I don't recall a whole lot of the details. What does he do aside from paperwork? Or is that literally the job of the Guild Pack, just to just fill out paperwork? Well, I think I read somewhere, and I can't point you to its source. I was doing some reading today, and I remember seeing something about how Jace can make pronouncements that are then essentially incorporated into the magical framework of the Guild Pack. So they have that metaphysical enforcement
00:38:37
Speaker
So he can do executive orders. Essentially, but almost like executive amendments. I think we're even further than that. He's basically the Pope.
00:38:48
Speaker
I mean, he's technically got divine intervention here. Maybe we will find out what happens when Jace either inevitably dies. He's shirting his duty. When he spends, what, weeks on Ixalan without his memories, thus not returning home. Some of the other stories, there's some hand wavy maybe in between the storylines. He went back to Ravnica to sign some forms, but certainly didn't happen when he was on Ixalan.
00:39:18
Speaker
And that was what, months? I'm not sure what the timeline was exactly. Oh, I suppose while he's on Ixalan, he definitely has some connection to the- To Ravnica through Azor. Because he bound Azor using Gilpac magic. Yeah. Yeah. There is something about the 25th amendment that we gotta find out because what happens when he's incapacitated, you know? It's even worse. Or under mind control.
00:39:43
Speaker
Yeah, Bolas is capable of that. Is Bolas able then to directly alter the framework of the guild pact? Presumably. Now I have two things to be excited for on Ravnica. So then just to end on a lighter note, a fun note, let's talk quickly about our favorite cards in Magic that show legal effects. Sky, you've got a couple that are your particular favorites, I think. Yes, definitely.
00:40:13
Speaker
My all-time favorite is Remand. Just the function and the flavor of it is just a perfect Melvin Vorthos merging of beauty. So I clerked for a few years in the Court of Appeals here and
00:40:37
Speaker
So I've remanded a lot of cases. And basically a remand is, you know, you send something up on appeal and the appellate court can't decide everything because either you need to send it, you need to send it back down to the trial court for further fact finding or to rule on something that hadn't been addressed yet, but that needs to be addressed in order for the case to proceed or to,
00:41:07
Speaker
do the, you know, if the court of appeals decides something, but that just requires further action by the trial court, that's a remand. You're remanding the case back to the trial court, you're sending it back down. And so, you know, function wise, you're doing, you're remanding a spell back to their hand, you're not deciding it, you're not countering it, you're just sending it back for them to do more with it.
00:41:29
Speaker
I think my favorite has to be Azor's Elecuter's, which we were also talking about off air. And that's simply because it's a card that has the word filibuster counter on it. Any deck that I can play that has filibuster counters, I'm all about. Yeah, I'm going to take one that's legal, but it's actually a little bit more
00:41:53
Speaker
prison based, I guess. Um, so I'm going to go with solitary confinement just because it's always been one of my favorite arts and just this idea that, you know, with the law, you know, being able to force somebody to basically have no contact with the outside world is one of the worst things that I can imagine.
00:42:10
Speaker
kind of even you're already separate from society and now you're separate from everybody else. Well, I mean, it is a legal thing. I mean, there's actually it's actually all frequently the subject of Eighth Amendment lawsuits. I just at this point, I'm just going to have to declare martial law because that's my choice. I was talking to Joe about this beforehand and all
00:42:31
Speaker
A lot of these law-centric cards, not all, but a lot of them seem to fall into two camps. You either have the counterspells or you have enchantments. And martial law is an enchantment. And I really like the flavor of, especially talking about law on Ravnica, laws that the Azorius can create and wield.
00:42:55
Speaker
An enchantment is an actual permanent thing, but it's not a physical object, and that is really well represented in the mechanics of the game.
00:43:05
Speaker
I'm going to go with a second hit for me, Absolute Law. Since I brought it up on the flavor text, it actually is a card also from Urza Saga. The ability itself is kind of hilarious because it's just all creatures have protection from red. That's apparently Absolute Law in the world of Urza land. But the flavor text is the strength of law is unwavering. It is an iron bar in a world of water.
00:43:37
Speaker
And then it gets dissolved just like the guild pact. And eventually Jace. That's our show. You can find the podcast on Twitter at goblinlorpod or email us any questions comments or concerns at goblinlorpodcast at gmail.com.
00:44:01
Speaker
Scott Peitzer can be found at the Booze Cube on Twitter. Joe Redemann can be found at Findhorn, that's F-Y-N-D, Horn. Hobbs Q can be found at Hobbs Q. And Alex Newman can be found at Alexander New M. The Goblin Lore podcast is a member of the Geek Therapy Network, which you can find at geektherapy.org or on Twitter at Geektherapy.
00:44:29
Speaker
Thank you all for listening, and remember, goblins, like snowflakes, are only dangerous in numbers.