I wish you hadn't said that, because the way the Schism war went down was as a series of wizard's wars with less and less provocation. That supports the idea that the offended covenants in the examples should just declare wizard's war and/or certamen to seek justice.
I re-read the chapter on the code in True Lineages. The peripheral code includes all of sanctum law (which doesn't appear in the oath at all) and such rulings as the "No more than 2 lbs silver per year," and there are references to the peripheral code covering inheritance and property law. If a tribunal can wring all of that from the code as written, a comprehensive peripheral code should still be possible. Should.
So, looking at the cases again (and now we're back to the first comment, that magi vote on these issues and they're as much political issues as legal ones):
Theft from mundanes endangers the order (this is almost as powerful as the commerce clause for stretching the limits of the Oath), since if the Magus is caught it'll encourage the mundanes to descend on the order. Hence, the thieving magus has forfeited immunity. Note that the question here is not whether that's a stretch or not, but whether magi in the past were willing to look the other way a little in order to get Thou Shalt Not Steal installed into the peripheral code. Given Guernicus' piety, I imagine the early Quaesitors were willing to try this.
I'm going to have to think about this one more.
The "deprive of magical power" clause is license for a well established body of law regarding claiming Vis sites, and the covenant that lost their site is far more likely to prosecute under those rulings than under the scrying clause, since they will almost certainly cover mundane interference in claims in addition to magical interference. The myth of the golden age probably means the Order's property law will closely resemble Roman law.
Between deprive of magical power, attack ally of the order, and good old endanger the order, any number of "decorum" laws could be in place to limit these kinds of shenanigans, especially after the Schism War showed the magi what happens when decorum breaks down.
Human sacrifice endangers the order, because it's certain to cause a witch hunt if Christian authorities ever discover it. If this wasn't the case before the schism war, it's the case after it.
Since we are discussing scrying, here is another that is a real case starting to develop.
The covenant uses piracy as an income source and one of their ships has gone missing. The local duke has suddenly stepped up his anti-piracy efforts. The mages go to investigate the duke and hear he has court magicians.
One of the mages has the major virtue shape shifter to try to spy in the duke and learn more about this sudden change in policy.
Is it violation of code for the shape shifter magus using their supernatural shape shifting to spy on the duke? To spy on the mages that have been allocated a building/section of the duke's place complex?
Magi might not be happy about mundane jurisdiction, but what are they going to do? How do you explain to the mundane authorities that you are immune to their authority? Why might the mundane magistrates find such an argument convincing?
Of course, you don't actally need to involve mundane magistrates if you want to prosecute a magus for 'mundane' crimes. Magi are perfectly capable of learning Civil and Canon Law. Just prosecute within the Hermetic world, but for mundane crimes, under mundane law, instead of for Hermetic crimes.
Unless the duke and/or his court magicians are somehow magi of the Order of Hermes (in which case they have their own legal problems in any canonical saga), the Code doesn't apply.
Let us assume for debate they are members of the order to address issue of scrying. (yeah, mundane interference is established if they are of the order and if they aren't of the order, they will be getting a join or die very likely.
If hermetic magi are interfering with the mundanes, they've forfeit their immunity. So scrying on a self-proclaimed court wizard to find out if he is hermetic seems unprosecutable. And if you find out he is, stop scrying and you can go to court with that alone. It should hold up.
Most likely they'll just ignore the mundane court and tell any officers of the court to Get Off Our Lawn! if they come calling at the covenant. How do you suggest a mundane court assert its authority over a group of Hermetic Magi? The only way I can think of is for the Tribunal to delegate authority to the mundanes and agree to support them, which is something I don't see Magi doing.
Much like the Church, the Order isn't about to let anyone else have justice over its members.
To be sure, Magi could learn Roman Law or some local customary law but under what authority would they hold court using this? It's an interesting thought that a Tribunal might have incorporated Justinian's Code or some other Roman codification of the law into the Peripheral Code but nothing published suggests they did.
Oh, I agree that a Peripheral Code could develop from the Oath in ways similar to what you suggest, but it requires a lot of concerted decisions over the centuries. None of the suggestions you make flow so obviously that one could say "see, it's right there in the Code".
It's interesting to consider that 13th century Europe is just beginning to rediscover Roman law and start a process that will over the next few centuries replace older customary law that's analogous to the Oath and its derivatives. Maybe something like that is going on in the Order, or has already gone on for the Order (with its longstanding libraries of antique texts). That would move us into a world of loopholes, technicalities, and never ending appeals to higher authority.
But think through what happens next. The officers of the court either don't "Get Off The Lawn" or they do, but return with back-up in the form of knights (or possibly hedge wizards).
Then what?
Of course, magi can probably deal with the immediate phyiscal problem, but if the magi are not very careful, they are going to end up trying to control vast segments of the mundane population through Rego Mentem, or in a battle with mundane forces, or something similar. And suddenly the magi are massively vulnerable to Heremtic prosecution for 'interference in the mundane'.
It's much better under Hermetic Law to submit to mundane justice and either pay your fines or possibly use Rego Mentem to control the decisions of the mundane magistrates (if you think you can do it subtly enough).
Yes, but that only really works because secular crimes like murder, theft, etc are canon crimes too, and because the church 'agrees' to not use ecclesiastical liberty to undermine secular justice. And even then the secular courts are not universally happy about the existence of canon courts.
Well as always your saga your choice, but are your NPC's all wise and all knowing judges of what is honorable. Because otherwise if they are it's far more likely for them to find the party they identify with as being honorable then for them to easily identify the dishonorable party. Thats the rub of a system based on public opinion. If you can convince those who sit in judgment of you that they would have done exactly the same thing in your position they will want to consider you to be in the right. And they will bend the laws as far as they possibly can to arrive at the decision they want.
So what you want to do is appeal to the pride and prejudices(zombies optional) of those who are to judge you. Get them to feel that you're one of them and your opponent is not. Once you do that all your loopholes and legal wrangling don't look like trickery but like perfectly reasonable explanations or at least honorable ways out of a bad situation. (Cough O.J. Cough Cough)
The sad fact is the people who implement justice are always easier to manipulate then the law itself. The more human elements you introduce in the more manipulatable the process is. So this sort of manipulation is even more of a problem in less codified systems where the intent is considered to be more important then the letter and each case is decided solely on it's own merits. "You didn't violate any oath because it clearly doesn't mean what that other guy is trying to con us all into thinking that it means. Yes what your saying goes completely against how our oath is actually worded but well it's not what you meant when you said it. It's certainly not what we meant when we gave our oaths. That guy is just trying to be weaselly and dishonorable by holding you to the letter of and not the clear intent we all understand. He shouldn't bother quoting precedent those cases where obviously entirely different because we ruled differently. In every single case like this one we've always ruled the same way. Correctly!
To the right mundane magistrate, being a fairy is probably a crime all of itself
And, regarding spying on court wizards, well, the Code specifically forbids a member of the Order from taking a position as one (AM5 p.14, Interfering with Mundanes, last line), so forfeit immunity obviously applies.
Go along to get along is usually a good strategy in these cases, to be sure. This is more a matter of expediency than of recognizing the authority of the mundanes. When it comes to the truly important matters, such as capital crimes, the Magi are going to make their own decisions.
I agree with you that this can easily lead to major escalation and in such cases a Tribunal may well lay all the blame on the original offending Magus for causing the mess.
Magic is a mundane crime, unless we're playing in a very parallel Mythic Europe. We're a few centuries away from witch burnings but sorcery is still illicit. Heresy is taken even more seriously and would likely apply to much of the Hermetic worldview. This makes it hard to imagine the Order following any mundane legal code in toto. It's convenient to say that Magi and mundanes can agree on things like murder but that still leaves plenty of difficult bits, even without considering civil issues like ownership rights to that Covenant or that faery spring in the middle of the deep woods.
If tribunal finds that the spying fairy isn't scrying, but simply a spying employee of another magus, then the fairy is still spying, which is still a crime. And that's when the magi would have to take their spying fairy case to the mundane courts, unless the peripheral code is robust enough for every day affairs.
Since it has no soul and stuff like that (not being human, in general), my players would tend to consider a discovered faerie spying on their door like a "nice lil' gift" sent by the spying magus. Self delivery vis bundle! They would be likely to publicly thank him for his efforts to send them such gifts during the next tribunal. If the fae was difficult to mangle they would point out that next time they would prefer a gift that has a slightly softer envelope.
Been there, suffered being patronized by a NPC myself. We took note of that. :mrgreen:
All I can say is that I don't think you understand what I'm saying. For me, in my sagas, the high medieval, Age of Chivalry culture has a very strong and well established sense of what is and is not honorable behavior. That "code of chivalry," for want of a better term, is the very cornerstone of the society. Being all wise and all knowing is not necessary to understanding and upholding honorable behavior. Knights, farmers, churchmen and magi all know and respect the ideals of their society.
A bleak view of humanity, which I do not share.
To borrow a quote: "What is there persuades this man that my words do not mean what they seem to mean in sane men's ears."
I'd say this is actually the cornerstone of just law: working out whether someone is justified in their actions. If, as the judge, you feel you would have acted in the same way as the plaintiff in the same situation then you are being both ethically and morally corrupt if you sentence them with anything other than leniency.
The idea is that those who sit in judgement are selected because they are wise, they idealise the notions of justice in the society in question, etc. If they can be convinced that in this case they would have done the same given their role, then expecting them to be anything other than lenient is making them fundamentally unjust. What can be more unjust than unleashing a punishment on someone for something that you yourself would do in the same circumstances? This is straight out of Tytalus' 'Book of Instruction' - law without reason.
If a judge wants to be seen to uphold the letter of the law while remaining compassionate to the circumstances, they can always apply a lenient punishment. Mitigating circumstances are exactly that. If they don't, you end up with a society made purely of an ideal of law with no morals to temper it. That's bleak. It's also Judge Dredd.
:mrgreen: