Lore
Jurisdiction After FTL
The collapse of older jurisdictional assumptions after FTL and slipstream travel made legal simultaneity nearly impossible.
Faster-than-light travel broke the assumptions behind the old lightspeed rule.
Once FTL existed, it became unclear how quickly knowledge of a law could reasonably be expected to propagate. Early FTL voyages were costly, infrequent, and often still required weeks or months of travel. Some remote colonies did not learn FTL existed until nearly a decade after its invention.
Slipstream travel complicated matters further. Travel times changed dramatically, but only for systems reachable through slipstream channels. Add relativistic time dilation and the impossibility of universal simultaneity, and interstellar law became a convoluted, arbitrary, contradictory tangle of jurisdictions, precedents, and guesswork.
Civil rights were routinely violated outside the Core worlds, and not infrequently inside them. Interstellar trade became legally hazardous, especially where corporate power, private enforcement, and inconsistent law overlapped.