Lore
The Lightspeed Rule
A pre-FTL principle stating that laws propagate at the speed of light, created to address jurisdictional delay across early colonies.
Before faster-than-light travel, efforts to establish law across inhabited worlds were limited by distance.
News of a law or legal precedent could take years to reach affected colonies. By the time a ruling arrived, technology, politics, or facts on the ground might already have changed. More isolated colonies often ignored interstellar law entirely.
The lightspeed rule emerged from this chaos. It stated that laws propagate at the speed of light: if a law passed on Earth went into effect immediately, it would not take effect on Sirius Prime until 8.6 years later.
Legal precedents were more complicated. A judicial interpretation might be treated as valid even in places where no one could yet have known about it, creating a messy and often unfair distinction between enacted law and interpreted law.