Speculation about Piltover's legal system (pre-rework lore)

So this was an essay project I was working on at Ao3, inspired by the thought that Piltover probably has a very good patent regime. But that was before everything in Piltover got super hardcore retconned. I found out about the recon this afternoon and I felt sad that it looks like everything I took as a premise in working out how Piltover's courts probably function is being either erased or explicitly contradicted so I figured I'd try sharing what I'd done (since after this lore rework is finished, my work is going to be obsolete) and this looked like the right part of the board?

I can't actually tell how this board system is supposed to be organized and I think this counts as "speculation"?

So yeah. Basically I'm posting this here now because redoing this work in the post-lore-rework environment is too depressing.

** Piltover: The Reign of Patents in Municipal Court**

I started with Piltover because it is, I think, a good candidate for “closest to the modern American legal tradition” out of the various polities on Runeterra.

The Steampunk Connection

Briefly, I think it is worth discussing the European steampunk influence. While steampunk obviously is a very broad genre that has gone many places and been adopted by groups globally, steampunk has deep roots in a vision of Edwardian or Victorian-period Europe gripped by a steam-fueled Industrial Revolution. In the Piltover context, I think that it is defensible to extend a Euro-centric vision to the city on account of that steampunk link and also various items of canon.

The first and most obvious of these items of canon is Caitlyn. Her title is somewhat non-illuminative as “sheriff” was an older English position that survived the journey to America. Her name, similarly, is an Irish name that has been taken up by the English-speaking world. Her accent, however, is, to an American ear, generically British (someone with more knowledge than I has identified it as British Received Pronunciation, making it the equivalent of the bland American Midwest newscaster accent in respect to pronunciation). This, I think, is a very strong piece of evidence in support of interpreting Piltover as some flavor of English.

In favor of interpreting Piltover as French is their art deco architectural theme. That said, the reasoning here is that art deco originated in France. It was extremely popular and spread around the world, so this is somewhat weak. Still, I do think it counts in favor of a Western European Piltover.

Going slightly farther afield in terms of both geography and canon-level, Red Baron Corki is a reference to Manfried von Richthofen, a German fighter pilot from World War I.

At this point, even if I haven’t convinced you that Piltover should be interpreted as European, I do not think that there is any strong evidence against interpreting Piltover with strong European influences. This concludes the first half of my steampunk analysis.

The second half of my introductory analysis has to do with “punk.” Punk is a bit hard to define, but I think that most people would agree it has major connections to anti-establishment sentiment and there’s also a strain of individuality. Ideally, in using this steampunk ethos as a starting point for theorizing Piltover’s legal system, I thus want either a legal system that tends towards expressing “punk” ideas or a legal system that ends up inspiring such sentiment in the populace.

The Canon

According to the wiki: “Piltover has a very empathic and progressive governing body. It is indicated that the citizens of Piltover collectively elect their representatives, who are referred to as statesmen. In order to improve the city-state's social and environmental well-being, statesmen constantly strive to implement their nation's rapid scientific innovations. Piltover is also one among Valoran's least militarized city-states, and also one of its most trusting.”

Immediate Implications of the Canon

The canon indicates only one governing body – a group of elected representatives called “statesmen.” As an aside, given the prominence of Caitlyn and the lack of mention of resistance to a woman in her line, I would guess that “statesmen” is not limited to males, though if they are called “statesmen” it may be the case that there is not parity. In any case, with mention only of this one group of representatives, and following absence of evidence being evidence of absence, there is no equally powerful alternate branch of government in Piltover.

So what does that mean?

Using the modern American system as a starting point, the Piltover model might basically consist only of Congress – a legislative body without a equally powerful executive or judicial branch. With no monarch or elected executive, I think that this single Piltoverian legislative body may also be unicameral instead of bicameral. Furthermore, as Piltover is the “City of Progress” (not the “Country of Progress”) this body may be fairly small in numbers compared to modern real-world legislative bodies since the polity itself is smaller.

Then, as the canon indicates a group of representatives striving towards a particular goal (rapid implementation of innovations), I would guess that Piltover is not characterized by intense partisan splits and gridlock. Instead, this unicameral supreme legislative body is quite collegial – and one could go from this to ask if Piltover is dominated by a conformist aristocracy.

Going again to this idea of the representatives striving towards implementation, I take this as evidence of legislative power (which, you may have realized, I already assumed in the preceding paragraphs). The questions then are: what is this lawmaking authority and how is it carried out?

Legitimacy

The Piltoverian legislature, the highest governmental body in Piltover, is elected. The canon indicates no king and no church and thus no divine right.

In the interests of time, energy, and fucks given, I’m about to make some rather sweeping political theory moves – that you may not agree with for various reasons. I’m happy to debate these further, I just didn’t see a need to get into it here.

So some group of Piltoverians have through their vote conferred upon the statesmen the right to exercise power over those who elected them (and, perhaps, those who did not). The Piltoverian legislature draws its legitimacy from those who elected them. This legislature’s power is unlimited, as far as can be seen from canon sources. There’s no mention of a constitution. In practice, it would be limited by whatever the electorate would be willing to bear, but so long as the legislature and the practical power in Piltover are aligned, the legitimacy issues remain theoretical and will not boil onto the streets.

The actual question of meaning when we speak of Piltoverian legitimacy and stability is “who is the electorate?”

The canon answer is “the citizens of Piltover,” a group that is not defined.

In the history of modern Western Democracy, the trend is that the voting citizenship starts as white male property owners. I specified “modern” because the ancient Greek and Roman systems were different than the trend that began with the American Revolution in important ways but I intend to address these systems in discussions of Mount Targon and Noxus later in this series.

The reasons for (the white male organizers) to choose (white) male property owners was… there are multiple theories. Property owners, it was thought, had a greater stake in society and thus would make stabilizing as opposed to destabilizing decisions (you don’t want the poor in charge, they thought, because the poor would abolish property to get something for themselves, and that would be bad for everyone). Property owning, also, was a sign of wealth and competence – these people have proven, through their wealth, that they are responsible and able to make good decisions. I choose not to here get more into why early versions of modern Western democracy were so discriminatory in terms of race, gender, and class.

The point I’m making here is this: I think it’s entirely possible Piltover has some restrictions on suffrage.

A likely candidate for a line in the sand is education.

What if Piltover restricts voting to only those who have attained a certain degree of higher education?

This would fit quite well into the city’s orientation towards innovation, education, and progress. It would narrow the voter base such that the elected statesmen are able to be closely collegial and oriented towards a single goal. It would also sharpen the individual imperative to attain status through education.

Incorporating a thought developed following some feedback: there is probably a great deal of discrimination that's "legal" in Piltover on the (rational) basis of attainment of formal and credentialed education. I think it's quite likely that banks in Piltover would use level of education as a major factor in determining eligibility for a loan - making it virtually impossible for someone who never finished high school (or the Piltoverian equivalent) to obtain financing to buy a house, start a business, get a hextech vehicle. Someone who went to a "lesser" college might have an easier time of it, but banks would still prioritize those who went to the most prestigious schools and, of course, this would be completely and totally legal and also encouraged. This might also crop up in the insurance industry with severe rate discrimination against people with lower levels of formal education (insurance, by the way, I think is a major feature of Noxian law, which I'll get to later in this series). Sometimes, in Piltover, there might even be cases where a "public" lecture by a hextech scientist allows only those with university diplomas to attend - why waste seats on the uneducated masses?

Implications of a Piltover Technocracy

I think that, for an American, such an explicitly education-oriented society isn’t that hard to grasp intuitively. It is, according to some theorists, the primary mode of transmission of cross-generational status. Where once parents wanted to leave land or money to their children, they now strive to provide a “good education” – as we are, rhetorically, a meritocracy. Education, society announces, increases a person’s human capital. Indeed, social status can be read from an individual’s educational pedigree. A high school diploma trumps a GED. Community college is better than a high school diploma. A four year university is higher-status than community college. Among four year universities, there is a pecking order – Harvard is higher prestige than Berkeley is better than East Carolina. And then there are graduate programs on top of that, also maintaining a status ladder.

I will not continue further on that line – other far more intelligent people have said much greater things about this issue and it’s not immediately relevant to my topic.

In any case, if we speak of a Piltoverian electorate that is composed only of those having attained a certain degree of education, we thus create a society that prioritizes education.

Such a City of Progress probably has public schools of some sort, though I see them as tending to be as competitive as New York City’s schools in terms of getting into the best possible public school. Thus, already, there is a situation where those able to afford better educational opportunities for their children set them up for success and high status later in life. The better public schools also would be complemented by a system of private schools.

And then Piltover has very, very good universities – the most prestigious being Piltover University. There is, doubtless, a calculation of ranking between universities and colleges in Piltover. Various private and public schools probably serve as feeders to certain post-secondary schools – better private schools feed directly to Piltover University, worse public schools feed to lesser-known community colleges.

As an aside, returning to the theme of “punk” – can Vi vote? In the Piltover I’m outlining here, no, she can’t. Someone like Vi, who lacks a formal education, would be systemically excluded from the levers of power – until some university grants her an honorary degree.

What eats at Vi more than this, though, is that the statesmen might hold her up as an example of Piltover as a functioning meritocracy. A prominent figure affiliated with the Sheriff, the statesmen hail Vi as proof that in Piltover, genius overcomes birth. In most cases, it doesn’t. And Vi knows that.

Going back to Piltover generally, in all of these schools, STEM fields are no doubt heavily prioritized and valorized over the humanities because Piltover is obsessed with technological innovation.

This has resulted in a strong patent regime but a generally weak, incompetent, and corrupt judicial system (see infra why Caitlyn’s lore supports this). In turning to this system, I will begin with what Americans think of as criminal law since that is what pop culture obsesses over.

Background: Pulling Some Things Together

Once upon a time, in English law, legal relief came from the king. The courts were the king’s courts. In order for royal justice to reach all the king’s lands, he had to delegate officers to go out to those places to administer the law. The result was a system were the various courts sat in London (or, in some special cases, other select cities) and then officers would “ride circuit” – would go out to the various places across England and hold court there, eventually reporting back to a central court.

Thinking about Piltover – Piltover is a city, not a country. Its legal jurisdiction is likely much smaller than England. As such, it probably has not developed a hyper-sophisticated jurisdiction map based on geography. Furthermore, unlike modern America, I see no evidence of a federated government system in Piltover, and thus there’s little reason to suspect they have a similar state/federal distinction. Instead, I propose that Piltover’s courts are organized in a single municipal system, housed in a single skyscraper courthouse.

This is in theory greatly simplified compared to America but is chaos in practice due to Piltoverian neglect.

I theorize that there is major neglect because of Caitlyn’s lore. Prior to Caitlyn’s one-woman crusade, Piltover was overrun by crime. This indicates to me a deep institutional inability to handle law enforcement as well as a defective judicial system – which I alluded to earlier speaking of prioritization of STEM fields to the detriment of the humanities.

Pulling in another piece of lore, Piltover is known for being one of the least-militarized factions.

Running down some bits of canon then –

Piltover had a very high crime rate prior to Caitlyn

Piltover tends to spawn vigilante justice (Caitlyn and Jayce)

Piltover’s government prioritizes implementing progress, thought of as scientific breakthroughs

Vi came from the outskirts of Piltover where there’s still very high crime

At this point, I’m envisioning a society that is run by a highly educated and wealthy (Caitlyn’s father is described as a wealthy statesman) aristocracy that customarily relies on private contractors to provide security (thus the tendency towards vigilantes) and therefore ends up neglecting poor parts of the city.

So what has made Piltover’s criminal justice system so awful? Corruption and incompetence? What, specific to the Piltover context, might have caused those things – in a system that on its face should be smaller and simpler (and thus more efficient) than what America is running?

The Civil Service and the Common Law and Piltover

Again, I choose to invoke real world history to explain the legal system I envision for Piltover. I do this assuming an American audience which is more familiar with a particular system. In modern Western law, there are essentially two main traditions: the common law and civil law. Common law was the system of the English kings and it spread with English colonies. Civil law developed on the continent out of Roman canon law (church law). It should likely surprise no one that primitive European law did not have quite the distinction between the two.

One of the essential issues of trying any criminal case is knowing the facts – if you know who killed John, then, well, we’re done, aren’t we? But who killed John?

Vastly oversimplifying, Medieval Christian Europe decided what the truth was by use of the ordeal system. There was trial by combat, there was hot iron, there was dropping women in water to see if they weighed more or less than a duck… With the Christian overlay, this was, supposedly, to call upon God as the fact finder – and God, of course, is omniscient and would always get the verdict right. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council forbade clergy from participating in these ordeals, essentially removing them from the judicial process across Europe (though trial by combat survived).

In the absence of God, men had to figure out how to determine who the murderer was.

In England, in a well-worn process academics call “path dependence,” existing native traditions grew and morphed and filled in the gaps and eventually resulted in the criminal jury trial, which survives to this day.

On the continent, due in part to the influence of church law in the universities (in the early modern European landscape, there were all sorts of courts and types of law – there were manorial courts, village courts, courts created by the king, courts headed by bishops – all with different sets of procedures that governed what could and could not be brought as a suit in that court and what remedies were available through that court), there developed what we now call the “civil law” system.

The simple way of explaining the difference is to say that the civil law system, instead of using juries to decide what did or did not happen, used university-trained judges (all of this is stemming from the absence of God as the fact finder – one needs authority, either from a group of other people or from a single well-qualified person). In a jury system also, the parties present evidence, in a civil system, the court finds evidence. Thus, the early civil law criminal system was much more personnel intensive than a common law jury system (it also had major drawbacks in terms of trying to establish rules for how to weigh evidence and the solutions were quite lacking).

What I hypothesize goes on in Piltover is that they have something analogous to a civil law criminal system but, since they pressure their “best and brightest” to go into STEM fields, judicial civil servants are not valued by society and therefore the people staffing their criminal judicial section are inclined to be badly paid and indifferent to the work. Furthermore, as the statesmen are preoccupied with chasing new innovations, there’s traditionally been little to no oversight and no impetus for reform. The bench will certainly not reform itself and, as no one cared, the bench has nomination and effective control power over new appointments. Corruption has accumulated in the criminal judicial sections to the point that it took someone like Caitlyn – interested, politically influential, and driven – to start cleaning the place up.

To sum this section up: I don’t think that Piltover has juries for criminal trials (meaning they don’t have juries period, see infra section on civil suits).

Appellate Review of Criminal Cases

Piltover has a civil law system appellate review process and it’s quite liberal in terms of allowing an appeal (this was an early development in Continental legal history following the abolishment of the ordeals since judgement was going from God to a single man or handful of men). Many convicted criminals, however, don’t know how the appeals process works and can’t take advantage of it. And, as criminal appeals are reviewed still by Piltoverian criminal law judges, it’s a crapshoot – that favors the well-connected. Given that there’s little interest in the criminal system, once a person has been found not guilty on appeal, that’s the end of it and they’re free to go. This has created a system where the wealthy crime bosses just have to get one corrupt judge involved who will acquit on appeal and the criminal walks.

On the whole, this is probably for the best since their system is broken and this failsafe protects the innocent, but it’s still rather suspect. The limit to this appeal system is a set number of appeals. There’s no hierarchy appellate structure, appeals judges are drawn from the same pool as the judges who investigate and decide on cases in the first instance.

What Happens Post Verdict?

I don’t see Piltover being overly fond of executions. I have little evidence to support this, that’s just my gut feeling from their materials. So do they lock up all their criminals? If they do, they probably don’t do it at the same rate as America – there’s only so much space in a city you can use for prisons. More likely, I think, would be exile (keeping in mind that this is a less strictly regulated world and since the city state is the basic unit of government, there’s probably a lot of interstitial countryside, making it fairly simple to kick someone out – but then how do you keep them out? See infra, customs and border control).

The Effect of the Piltoverian Criminal Judicial System on Law Enforcement

There is something of an inconsistency in Piltover lore. Supposedly there is an organization called the Piltover Patrol that goes around using bots to provide charity care and patrol streets in the name of law and order.

Given that Caitlyn’s lore references a time when Piltover was overrun with criminals and Vi’s lore talks about the outskirts of the city being lawless (supra), I’d attempt to explain this inconsistency as the Piltover Patrol being a very recent institution created at Caitlyn’s urging.

As I’ve already hypothesized that Piltover’s elite rely on private contractor security instead of police (see infra, vigilantes), I’d continue here to say that I think Piltover’s police force before Caitlyn’s involvement was just as bad as its criminal justice system. Indeed, this makes sense, as the criminal justice system wasn’t interested in or capable of processing any criminals that the law enforcement officers arrested. Furthermore, in Piltover, law enforcement was probably seen as a menial job for the most part – since Piltover so prioritizes science and innovation (see supra, effects of lack of perceived status on criminal justice civil service).

Of course, there’s an alternate theory here that’s much more optimistic.

As Piltover is one of the least militaristic factions, police may have served a far more community-centric role and done little in the realm of law and order. Such a police force may have attracted the very humanistic public-minded sort of people who worked very hard for a good cause and little pay (and then been overwhelmed by the lack of funding and public support, and thus unable to keep up with rise of organized crime in the city).

I’m not terribly interested in law enforcement though, so I will leave it at that.

Commerce, Trade, and Patents

In contrast to the people handling crime in the judicial system, in this world building exercise, I would theorize that Piltover’s judicial officials who work with commerce, trade, and especially patents are all highly trained and highly paid – they are those who specialized first in hextech sciences and then moved to the judicial civil service.

American patents, briefly – in order to prosecute a patent (construct and file a patent), an American lawyer must be a member of the Patent Bar, and in order to do that, the lawyer must have a degree, undergraduate or graduate, in the sciences (there are other ways, none of which are common enough for me to mention here). Any lawyer can litigate a challenged patent, but only a member of the Patent Bar can file one.

It’s something of an open question among legal scholars whether or not patents actually have any substantial positive effect on innovation – but since I like things being complicated, I’m inclined to say that Piltover has a very, very sophisticated patent law system and generally has created a good legal structure for anything that involves technology – meaning transport, sale, regulation, etc. This happened in part because, supra, a segment of Piltover’s highly trained hextech scientists joined the civil service and also because, supra, Piltover’s statesmen were very interested in legislating in this area. In addition, the parties involved in these kinds of legal issues are either wealthy individuals or corporations, creating even more interest in positions refereeing their relations and thus encouraging a better run operation.

As a rule of thumb in Piltover, the closer you get to run-of-the-mill criminal judicial proceedings, the more incompetent and corrupt the bench is. The closer you get to technology regulation and patent prosecution, the more world-leader you get. Low level tort (slip-and-fall) and even minor low-stakes contract disputes tend to go the way of criminal proceedings. Small claims court is a coin-toss – with a bit of added risk since Piltover mandates that the loser pays the winner’s court fees.

Another feature of Piltover’s judicial system is that the highest level of appellate review available for a civil case lies with the legislative body of statesmen (until the late 20th century, in England, ultimate court appellate review power was located in the House of Lords). The elected statesmen, representing the Piltoverian elite, are highly educated inventors themselves and quite able to analyze science and technology.

Patent, Trademark, and Trade Secret – Piltover Intellectual Property

I begin with trademark because it will be the quickest to get through. In short, Piltover’s trademark law is settled, enforced, and accepted. The corporate interests value it highly as a part of their business models and it’s relatively uncontroversial. There are occasionally interesting cases that come through, but they’re generally interesting because of their fact patterns, not because of the underlying law.

Next is patent. After all I’ve said about how bad Piltover’s criminal justice system is and how good their patent law is, I think that patent law does touch on criminal law in that criminal punishments (imprisonment or exile) can be levied for patent infringement in addition to civil punishments (fines).

I choose this system because of Piltover’s hyper emphasis on scientific advancement and innovation (and since I already committed them to using patents to bring this about, despite the controversy over whether or not patents work).

Generally, Piltover’s Patent Office (it’s a patent office – it’s not combined with trademark) is more likely to grant narrowly constructed patents. Basically, it has very high standards. It has one of the largest workloads of any government agency in Piltover, is very well funded, is constantly the target of lobbying, and is often the subject of public scrutiny and debate (quite different from the American PTO). As an aside, “useful” is not one of the requirements for a patent in Piltover but “innovative” is.

For all that Piltover values patents, a lot of innovation is hidden as a trade secret though. This is acknowledged to be unideal in Piltover because the academic inventors are very influential with the statesmen and tend to believe that more innovation can be accomplished if the knowledge pool is larger. Trade secret law, however, is essential because of proximity to Zaun.

Zaun and Customs and Border Control

Zaun, unlike Piltover, is pretty much unregulated and does not protect Piltoverian patents. There’s a general perception in Piltover that Zaunite inventors steal from Piltover (see Jayce and Viktor).

In any case, while Piltover likes to export its innovative gadgets around the world and makes a pretty penny off of this, their customs and border control agency is well funded and dedicated to keeping Zaunite hextech out of Piltover. As much as it can, it also works to prevent cutting edge Piltoverian advances from getting to Zaun. This isn’t really easy to do though.

Because of concerns about Zaunite piracy, a significant body of hextech science is hidden away as trade secret instead of patent.

Corporations

Some time ago, Piltover adopted the idea of a trust from Demacia and rebranded it the “corporation” (Demacian trusts arise from their feudal organization and will be covered in a chapter for that city state). Piltoverian jurists are not fond of acknowledging this, but that’s how it happened.

A leading Piltoverian corporation is quite similar to a leading domestic corporation, though somewhat less sophisticated. While the lawyers shepherding these corporations about are not as incompetent as Piltover’s criminal civil service, they are also not as expert as Piltoverian patent lawyers. Furthermore, because the number and size of corporations in Piltover is limited due to Piltover being a city and not a nation and the state of the rest of the world (see supra, conditions for exile), the intensity and sophistication of corporate law in Piltover, while a leader on Runeterra, is less than modern real world corporate law.

Regulatory Law and Enforcement

Piltover’s regulatory law walks the fine line between encouraging innovation and discouraging uncontrolled explosions. Regulatory law is one place where Piltover’s statesmen take a hands-on approach and frequently pass new legislation.

It’s worth pausing to ask how these regulations are enforced. The world I’ve generated thus far allows for a couple possibilities.

One is that the police, while indifferent to street crime, were mainly employed to carry out corporate-related verdicts (meaning the statesmen used the police to seize the property of corporations and scientists not in compliance with regulations in order to enforce fines or other civil penalties).

Another possibility is that the statesmen individually use their private contractor security forces to act on behalf of the government.

And that brings me to my final section…

“Punk” (The Conclusion)

The above is an outline of a working but deeply flawed government and judicial system that might have generated (or been generated by) Piltover as we know it. It could easily, in my view, support a culture that would have the strong conformist vibe that might instigate a punk movement. It also creates glaring areas of inadequacy that result in poor social mobility and high crime for lower status residents of the city – and this too could contribute to unrest. This is, of course, only my conjecture about one possibility for Piltover. One might find it bleak - it doesn't have to be bleak. There are alternate possible constructions for Piltover's government and judicial organs that could make it a shining example of everything good in the world. The ones I have just presented are simply the ones that made the most sense to me as I was thinking about this - and the ones that I thought would combine to create a regime that would make a dynamic setting for people to use in making stories.