The Law

The Laws of the Nestos League

The Laws of the Nestos League can vary from city to city. Initially Victor Spear tried to find out the common practices in the cities of Thrace. The goal was to create a uniform set of laws based on existing laws in the culture with debate from the scholars about fairness and application.

Traditional laws and customs were codified to create an initial set of laws to look over. Part of this was to show that there were traditions worth keeping. The traditional laws and customs were modified then codified. When a decision was made by a city council, council of scholars, or when people came to seek redress from a scholar bureaucrat, the decision and story were recorded for future record and looked over during the next similar actions. This helped create both precedent and uniformity for law.

This has accumulated into a standardized set of rules for common problems like theft, fences, neighbors, merchants, and similar issues.

The laws from all over Thrace are sent to the Council of Wisdom for review where there is discussion of standardization for laws between cities as well as fairness and justness in the philosophical sense. Some of the scholars are specially chosen to review these records and preside over particularly difficult decisions. There has been some review of the Crimean practice of law speakers, but their practices have not been adopted.

Because of the cost of prisons many laws are enforced by fines or labor duties depending on the type of crime. People also can be exiled or stripped of their status of scholars or warriors. It is expected that a warrior or scholar will act honorably.

Because many of the laws were put into hard clay tablets to avoid modification when carried between cities, the laws are often tables or tablets. After twenty five years, there are many clear precedents for common problems.