Judgement: A Star Wars Story

Chapter 1

Do you remember the day they arrived? Do you remember?

You had only been hired within the year, and you were still getting used to things. The judge who decided to take you on had been impressed with your law school thesis on the rights of planets that had been colonized back in the days of the Empire, an issue that had been debated with great fervor in both the courts and the legislature almost immediately after the Battle of Jakku. Genocide, torture, strip-mining, slavery...all of those were easy for the galaxy to disavow, but how could average citizens comprehend the destruction of thousands of cultures when that destruction hadn't involved blasters or any other sort of physical force?

Aldahni. That was the planet you focused your thesis on. The ex-Imperials and many of the leaders of the New Republic who had never had any ties to the Empire were content to believe that the Aldahni people had only themselves to blame for their current state. You had a different view of the matter. In your thesis, you argued that the Empire actively pursued to destroy the Aldahni culture so that the people and the planet could be more easily exploited. The policing of their tri-annual holiday, the "Eye", the establishment of alcohol dispensaries in high population areas, and the strategic forced migrations so that the infamous air base could be built in the once sacred and then flooded valley; what the Empire did on Aldahni was different from what it did on so many other planets only in that it didn't look like an obvious show of force to the untrained eye. Sometimes colonialism and domination involved blasters, sometimes it didn't. And yet, just as there aren't any Geonosians alive today, neither are there any living people native to the planet Aldahni. Lord Vader personally decapitated the last Geonosian, no one ever lifted a finger to harm the Aldahni, yet the results are quite the same.

Some of the professors at your thesis defense were less than pleased. You once wrote that one older man in the corner of the room was shaking his head almost the whole time. Despite all the evidence you produced, all the old records you had carefully poured over (and we all know how much the Empire loved keeping records), he condemned your work and tossed out all the old Imperial lines: the Aldahni were lazy, they didn't have to consume the alcohol flooding their towns, that they had freely entered into an agreement with the Empire and in fact they had been the ones to not live up to their end of the deal. He had never been part of the Imperial bureaucracy, but he was definitely sympathetic. Theoretically, professors, especially law professors, are supposed to judge their student's work on the facts alone, but it goes to show you just how polarized things still were. Most people lived in one reality, and the others chose to live in some other make-believe universe handed out to them by politicians intent on stealing their galaxy.

The courts, where the difference between fact and fiction was more important, though still transgressed from time to time, had been anticipating you joining them. Once you graduated law school, you applied to a prestigious clerkship, not at the highest court on Hosnian Prime, the temporary capital at that point, but in the nearby Stocus system on the planet Major Sotokagen. That's where the Inner Rim Court was located. Individual planets within the New Republic had their own courts that sent cases up to the System Courts, and then those cases were passed along to the Regional Courts which passed them onto either the Outer Rim, Mid Rim, Expansion Regions, Inner Rim, or Core World Courts, depending on where the original cased had started. The Galactic Courts then chose to take up cases from Rim Courts and interpret laws for the entirety of the New Republic.

At the time, the Inner Rim Court was presided over by Judge Garrilliond, a judge who a previous Supreme Chancellor had unsuccessfully attempted to seat on the Galactic Court thanks to the new wave of pro-Imperial legislators. Garrilliond himself had been ex-Imperial, but only in that he had been a judge on a local court and had upheld the law and done his best to interpret it as generously as he could. Later, in the early days of the New Republic, he had been somewhat of a centrist, yet the fact that he was nominated by a protégé of Mon Mothma was enough to earn him the ire of the pro-Imperial faction. It was only a few years after those initial confirmation hearings that he was able to receive an appointment to the Inner Rim Court.