To understand the Empire, you need to know about the birth of the Empire.

Due to the incredible amount of issues involved in recordkeeping, no one knows quite exactly when the Old Kingdoms fell to the forces of the god known as the Corruptor. (Among those: The Corruptor’s forces didn’t use the same calendar as anyone else, those who escaped the forces on Taeliana had more important things to do, and those who escaped into the Firstworld, well, time in the Firstworld runs kind of funny there.)

When the Reclaiming War happened, when the descendants of those who escaped to the Firstworld came back to take Taeliana back from the Corruptor’s forces, the people who ran it decided that the big problem was the Old Kingdoms were too fractured and the infighting was the problem. They proceeded to name the head of the armies, Stefan Metalis, as the Emperor, and he proceeded to make them very angry by founding the Empire on concepts that the nobles who expected to take power and have an Emperor they could control didn’t like much.

He founded it on ideals like being a realm of laws, not of the whims of the nobility. Ideals like a basic level of rights for all the peoples; the abolition of serfdom and slavery; not punishing those who didn’t fight with them; and finally, the peoples who were made by the experiments of the Corruptor’s minions were not to be slaughtered outright.

Sounds like a pretty good person.

For the most part, the Emperor or Empress has been a good person who believes in these things. The first Emperor set in a process to update the laws so that they don’t just go to the whim of the Emperor, so the Empire remains a realm of laws, for the most part.

The Emperor also declared his heir would go in disguise to find a partner amongst the common people, which kept some connection with the non-nobility in the family and kept them pretty much honest. This also caused some interesting law updates – when your heir comes back and introduces his husband, or her wife, and in one case one of each?

What did that do to the law?

Imperial Law has enshrined the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community, and that’s not going to change any time soon. (The Grand Marshal of the Armies and his husband are happy together and no one wants to offend a fellow whose title of “Mailed Fist of the Empire” isn’t just because he has a prosthetic arm…)

Wait, a prosthetic arm? How did that happen?

Each year, the Emperor or Empress issues the Imperial Challenges on the Imperial Birthday, a set of requests from the Empire for researchers to pursue. This has made a number of magical formulae extremely efficient – by which read “cheap to make”. It’s not unheard of for people to have magical eyes to replace lost ones, magical earpieces to let the deafened hear, and prosthetic limbs and mobility devices are within the realm of purchase of even a poor farmer.

Is there more to know about Imperial law?

Early in Imperial history, when they were getting stuff off the ground, there were issues with food distribution.They were still dealing with spies, partisans, people whose minds had been messed with, and there was sabotage. And then came the First Century Food Riot of Calliasha.

The Imperial Capitol was being built up into the great capitol from the small fishing village it had been, which needed a lot of workers. After a while, they started getting sick of fish three times a day. Some agitators (a few believing that the whole Empire thing was a bad idea, some mindfixed, and some annoyed that they couldn’t get into power) started problems. The Imperial Trade System hadn’t been set up yet, so there were usually shortages of some kind or another. It wasn’t hard to set it off into a riot.

When it was over, two hundred and fifty were dead. The cleanup took three months, including the trials.

Emperor Stefan II, the second emperor, nicknamed “The Emperor Of A Thousand Enemies” for his ability to piss off all the right people, issued an Imperial Pardon for most of the people involved, except for the instigators, then told some of his underlings that he’d be busy for a bit and shut himself away for a month. When he emerged, it was with the two documents that earned him his nickname: the Declaratio Iurium and the Declaratio Officiorum; the Declarations of Rights and the Declaration of Responsibilities. These are the foundational Imperial documents.

The Declaratio Iurium formalized the rights and freedoms of the Populace.

• The right to live safe in your home.
• The right to privacy from the Empire, unless you are actively plotting against it.
• The right to marry freely.
• The right to petition your local nobles for a redress of grievances along with the rules for what to do if they don’t seem to care.
• The right to an education. (The Empire doesn’t have univeral literacy, but they strive towards it.)
• The right to swift, efficient and merciful justice.
• The right to choose your workplace. (Slavery, even to the level of serfdom, is illegal in the Empire except for some crimes, which binds you to Imperial Service for your sentence.)

It also has an amendment process, which has been used to update Imperial Law to recognize same-sex marriage, plural marriage, the rights of the transgender community to be recognized as who they are, and, oddly, the right to ask people not to wear oversized hats in theatres. (It was the defense in a murder case. It came down to “it’s legal to ask, but you can’t then stab the person if they say no.”)

The Declaratio Officiorum dictates the rights and responsibilities of the Nobility, stating that “The Responsibilities of the Populace is Self-Evident”. (This has pissed off some nobles.) It goes through what a noble is supposed to do for their people, for their subordinate nobles, the Responsibilities of the Imperial Throne to the Populace, and then, after basically saying “if the people on your land are starving, you have to either feed them, let them move on to better places, or yell for help”, it codifies the Declaratio culpae ad meliorem – a petition that anyone can send to the Imperial Throne to have their noble reviewed if they’re lousy and their supervising nobles aren’t doing anything.

It doesn’t happen often – one of the better parts of the two documents is that there is no law against a morgantic marriage (one where a noble is marrying someone lesser on the order of nobilities than them), so in a way the nobles have been breeding over the millenium for common sense. But there’s always a chance.