Magic and the law. In the eyes of a lawmaker there are few things in this world that are less compatible. Magic may claim to have its own internal logic and set of rules, and magicians may operate according to some arcane code or laws within their own associations but as far as the law of the land is concerned, magic is a force of Chaos incarnate and I don't know a single lawyer, judge or lawmaker who doesn't cringe a little bit at the mention of dealing with it. The problem lies in the very nature of the way magic and magicians work, ideas that make many of the day-to-day experiences and activities of magicians problematic from a legal standpoint.

The law, as an institution, is based on control. Control of people's actions in order to protect sociery from itself. The law says that it is wrong for you to simply gun down someone in the street and that society will punish you for it. This limits your freedom to kill whomever you want, but it also protects you from having someone else who doesn't like how you're dressed from giving you a .45 caliber opinion on the matter. (Keep in mind that I'm talking about an ideal model here. I know that people can and do gun each other down on the streets all of the time, but it's the idea that the law allows us to control it that I'm speaking of here.)

Now magic, on the other hand, is predicated on being free from control. Magicians are very self determining individuals who strongly value personal freedom. Magical training is intended to teach a fledgling magician to free themselves from being bound by mundanities with parables in which the magician is required only to follow the dictates of his or her, inner self or karma or destiny or whatever.

Add to this the fact that the only effective means of policing and controlling magic is by magicians. Magical manifestations (like spells and spirits) are best dealt with by magicians, and so the magical community is required to be selfpolicing. If lawmakers wish to make a ruling on some magical phenomena, they must rely heavily on the opinions of the very people whose cases they are deciding.

Lastly, magic is a subjective and largely immaterial phenomenon that cannot be seen or measured by mundane, objective means. Magic is knowledge, and history teaches us that knowledge is notoriously difficult to control, contain or legislate. Magic relies almost entirely on first-hand testimony of subjective experiences, testimony that can and must be thoroughly questioned and crossexamined before any court can accept it as valid.

All of these things combine to form the tangled legal maze of rulings regarding magic since the first manifestations in the early part of this century. Some judges actually thought they'd be clever and resorted to laws that had been on the books for centuries, ancient outdated witch-trial rulings and even codes of ancient cultures that believed in magic. It is difficult to keep a straight face when debating the legal value of some of the precedents laid down by the Salem Witch Trials, and many in the magical community took strong offense at these materials being the basis for a new body of law concerning them.

For the most part, entirely new precedents and laws were needed, which meant a long and slow process of hammering out legal definitions of the many and varied aspects of magic and deciding how magic would be controlled and how that control would be administered and so forth. Magically sawy or magically-active lawyers made their fortunes riding the crest of this new trend in law, fighting and winning numerous ground-breaking cases in the courts of the UCAS, CAS, California and the Native American Nations.

The sheer body of material on magical law would fill a terapulse database -- far too much to go into here. Broadly speaking, magic is governed by the same basic laws of the land as everything else. It's just as illegal to kill someone with a spell as with a gun. Defrauding someone through illusion is the same as defrauding them with false advertising, etc.

In many cases, there has been a need to define new crimes to fit the new abilities that magic has introduced to the world. United States vs. Robeill, for example, established that magically seizing control of another's mind was a violation of that individual's rights akin to rape and established the category of "magical assault" crimes, including the use of ritual sorcery against an unsuspecting victim.

If Lone Star got a tenth-yen for every panicked call they got from someone who thought they were being attacked with ritual sorcery, they'd double their annual profits.