January’s WBC24: Politics, Crime, and Law
Although this is the first substantive post for my 2024 Worldbuilder’s Book Club series, I hope it’s not a representative one; my choices this month turned out to be less appropriate for the prompt than I’d hoped and my discussion will be somewhat unfocused as a result.
I picked Rupert Ross’s Dancing with a Ghost: Exploring Aboriginal Reality (1992, Toronto: Penguin) as January’s book because the topic for this month is “Politics, Crime, and Law,” and Dancing with a Ghost was filed in the legal section of the local public library. This is from the blurb on the back:
As a Crown Attorney working with First Nations in remote northwestern Ontario, Rupert Ross learned that he was routinely misinterpreting the behaviour of Aboriginal victims, witnesses, and offenders, both in and out of court. He discovered that he regularly drew wrong conclusions when he encountered witnesses who wouldn’t make eye contact, victims who wouldn’t testify in the presence of the accused, and parents who showed great reluctance to interfere in their children’s offending behaviour. With the assistance of Aboriginal teachers, he began to see that behind such behaviour lay a complex web of coherent cultural commandments that he had never suspected, much less understood.
Based on this, I thought the book would suit the month’s topic. Unfortunately, I don’t think it really does–or at least it reveals less about the law than I had hoped. It fits July’s topic, “Culture and Religion,” much better, and as a GM I need to learn more about law than I need to learn about anthropology. Furthermore, I feel a bit uncomfortable talking about this book primarily for its use in worldbuilding, considering how disrespectfully white Canadians have treated, and still treat, northern First Nations communities and their cultures. I don’t want to think only in terms of how I can use their experiences.
That’s not to say there’s nothing to learn here about crime and the law: certainly Dancing with a Ghost gives many specific examples of how the legal system of an occupying people can harm a minority population even when it’s trying to help, because the occupying culture and the minority culture have fundamentally different ideas about what a legal system is for. Ross has also painted a picture of small-scale subsistence hunter-gatherer life that is very different from what I might have expected it to be and it will influence how I depict similar societies going forward. If you are looking for a book for July’s topic of “Culture and Religion,” you could do worse than this one. I’m glad I read it. I did not think it satisfied the prompt, however.
(As an aside, I do not think this book will be helpful if you want to run a game in David Somerville’s Planegea, one of my favourite settings for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, despite the fact that most of Planegea’s inhabitants live in hunter-gatherer cultures. Ross’s argument is that northern First Nations’ norms evolved to suit people who live in isolated family groups in subsistence conditions. In Planegea, people live in large multi-family groups and, if Ross’s speculation is correct, it is implausible that people living in such groups would develop the norms he describes.)
So I decided to finish reading Austin A. Baker and J. Remy Green’s “There Is No Such Thing As A ‘Legal Name’” (2021, Columbia Human Rights Law Review 53.1 [link]), which I had started and abandoned this past autumn. In it, Baker and Green argue that there is no such as a single legal name in the United States of America; instead, the law is such that a person can have a number of names, each of which is their legal name under a different domain of the law. The argument is compelling; I’m no lawyer, so my opinion here counts for very little, but on seeing the evidence laid out in the first section of the paper I think they are clearly correct. In the second section Baker and Green speculate a little about how so many people have come to believe in the idea of a (single) legal name, despite no such thing existing; in the third section, they lay out the three kinds of harms that the mistaken belief in a legal name causes and make a reasonable policy proposal to reflect this reality.
I found the review interesting, persuasive, and readable – but I cannot imagine how I will use any of it in a roleplaying game. Although my second choice was on topic, I don’t think it is actually useful for the exercise – with one small exception.
Baker and Green’s examination mentioned, in passing but on more than one occasion, the difference between common law and civil law. I didn’t know what the difference was, so I looked it up and found something I might actually use in a TTRPG setting someday. As an Anglophone Canadian, I had assumed that most modern legal systems use precedent heavily in their decisions, but it turns out I was wrong. Only in common law systems do previous legal decisions so substantially influence how cases are decided; in civil law systems, it’s the statutes themselves that govern legal decisions. Moreover, I learned that there are other legal systems beyond those two. Now that I know the difference, I won’t depict fictional settings’ legal systems as common law by default. If you want to learn about this yourself, I recommend Wikipedia’s “List of national legal systems,” which outlines all of the possibilities and links to articles for each.
I don’t regret reading anything I chose for the book club this month, but I do hope that my future selections are more obviously relevant to worldbuilding. If nothing else, that would allow me to write a more focused and more helpful blog post next month.
Originally published 2 February 2024