Remuneration affair
The Remuneration affair was a sequence of events in 1821 triggered by the Baron of Ral-lang, later Prime Minister in the 1840s, attempting to reform the pay structure of the Themiclesian Navy. He sought to eliminate payroll fraud by naval bursars who were rumoured to withhold wages from servicepeople by means like fictitious charges, compensations, and fines by publishing a clear schedule of remunerations applicable to various classes of servicepeople and the standard ways by which this pay was increased or reduced, and furthermore by involving them in the tabulation process so as to render them aware if they salaries were unduly withheld. However, the reform was poorly legislated and implemented without due consideration for the servicepeople it sought to protect, leading to the Marines' revolt of 1821 which the Baron claimed was merely a rumour. Yet stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the mistakes of the policy, Parliament finally rescinded the law in 1822 after a joint brief submitted by the Kien-k'ang Board of Financiers, Chamber of Barristers, Guild of Scriveners, and Governing Board of Notary Attestors; in the brief, they testified for both Houses of Parliament the reform was legally faulty, confusing, and a genuine monstrosity.
Background
In 1821, the Baron of Ral-lang was made President-Baron of the Admiralty in the administration led by the Baron of Men-lang. Ral-lang applied himself to naval affairs and kept a close ear on the rumours in the common naval serviceperson's circles, a principle complain amongst whom was that salaries were unfairly withheld for a variety of unjustified reasons. Regardless of the scale of the problem, which Ral-lang never seriously investigated, he devised a plan to make the naval serviceperson more involved in supervising the amount of money due to them. He took inspiration from how officials like judges and magistrates took their salaries with a claim filed to the Exchequer rather than relied on a paymaster and ordered that marines in particular should do the same. To this end he secured the passage of Caput 32 ′Er LXIX, which directed them to submit a claim to the Exchequer in the amount of their salaries according to the schedules he arranged broadly read and posted by the warship's mate.
However, a secretary in the Admiralty wrote to Ral-lang that, as a fact, marines were not tested for numeracy and, in his opinion, unlikely to be adequately numerate or literate for filing the salary claim unless they had aspirations to office, in which case they had to demonstrate these abilities. As the policy went ahead, captains usually permitted them to venture ashore to seek out scriveners to write the claim paper and paid for a member of the gentry, acting as attestor, to sign the claim on their behalf. This process was costly because the law was new and few scriveners were familiar with the correct form of the claim to be submitted, and many gentlemen were hesitent to sign for a novel type of claim. Additionally, the type of paper required by the Exchequer was itself expensive—the worst-paid ratings could only afford a few sheets with a day's pay. Many also did not have personal seals, which were required to close the scroll.
Many scriveners refused initially to write the claims due to the issues they saw with the law or demanded a jurist's sworn brief (that the claim demanded was actually founded in the law) before they would set pen to paper. The situation ameliorated in late 1821 as the first successful claims were remanded, demonstrating to scriveners that such claims were indeed valid. Though the process was perhaps not as chaotic as initially feared by some, the cost of claiming the salary was considerable and likely above whatever portion unjustly withheld from marines' salaries common in the period. This was also an issue for those who did not have enough savings on hand to claim file the next salary claim. This put them into debt instead.
There were also reports of unscrupulous scriveners who claimed to be able to write superior claims to effect a larger salary payment, and by these statements apparently some marines were misled to pay more for their services than normal. This is probably becuase marines were known not to be frequent patrons of scriveners, since they rarely had papers to file with the authorities (minor disputes between marines were resolved by oral tribunals before the captain, so no official briefs were filed). Some such scriveners were later put into bulletins to be publicly reprimanded. The amount accredited jurists charged for a sworn brief also varied considerably.
While some modern films have portrayed some marines writing their own claim briefs and only to become flustered when they were rejected at the Exchequer due to poor handwriting or incorrect calculation, this was historically very rare if it happened at all. Like most other people, marines of the age would have been well aware that there was almost no chance a brief of their own writing would be approved and so would not have seriously bothered to try. Indeed, it is common knowledge that only trained professionals could write proper briefs, which is a highly technical document that fulfils various legal requirements in jargon, and the established practices of attorneys and scriveners attest to their indispensability in writing briefs. As Mack B. said, there was no procedural difference between judicial and administrative processes, and just as one would not litigate without a lawyer in this age, one would not submit a brief without proper advice in those ages.
Martin Clerk, an expert on the history of Themiclesian briefs, has remarked that "the size of the brief usually has no relation with the complexity of the matter at hand, since very simple matters may require a very elaborate, circumlocutory description, while very complex matters could begin with a very short or even completely formal disclosure". This is because "everything about briefs is mean to allude to previous briefs that have been proven to have a certain result: the filing party alludes to previous decisions procured by known terminology, while the authority alludes to previous decisions to make the familiar decisions based on familiar terminology. Such is made clear by the prologue of many briefs, "in lieu of such an action of such a year" etc. Extreme lengths are gone to in describing a matter in completely different terms to procure a predicted result."
The technicality of the early-19th-century brief was such that a single incorrectly written word could see the brief overruled. It was very difficult for a layperson to acquire a coherent understanding of what the law actually require appertaining to briefs, even if all the relevant statutes were laid out before them, as statutes rarely reference each other. The interrelationships between the statutes were, at times, as much a matter of consensus and practice as logic, and such knowledge is passed at the legal practices. Some materials included in briefs also originate in precedence, rather than statute; amongst this is the issue of terms and turns of phrase, many of which had meanings not typically employed in conversation. Information is conveyed by such turns of phrase that is not found in actual words. According to such a set of hidden rules the Exchequer sustained or overruled briefs, and this did not significantly change until 1894 with the passage of the Routine Briefs Act (行書令), which explicitly set forth the forms of words and turns of phrases to be used in many standard applications by the public.
Since the correct forms of words and turns of phrases were no longer informed by centuries of practice and knowledge of disparate statutes, but spelled out explicitly, along with the advent of public education, the Routine Briefs Act dealt a heavy blow to the scrivener profession, which was centred exactly on producing acceptable briefs of a routine nature. Briefs for things of a non-routine nature were generally written only with a sub-brief given by a neutral jurist or a legal attorney for someone; in such cases, the scrivener's duty was limited to transcribing the attorney's ideas in the sub-brief into the words and phrases required customarily by the authorities. In 1913, the Jeofails Act further restricted the ability of law courts and authorities to overrule briefs for "immaterial errors", which meant errors that could not mislead as to the meaning of the brief; where the error was immaterial, the court or authority may only command the brief be re-filed when the error is discovered, rather than terminate the pending case for fault. And the determination of whether an error is material or not may itself be challenged.
The next reform came with the Public Process Act of 1933, which provided that government agencies themselves were to provide standard "blank briefs" that came pre-printed with all needed legal texts and left only the relevant information for the applicant to fill. By this law, most services provided by the government could be initiated by a brief provided by the agency, so the applicant needed no longer even consult the Routine Briefs Catalogue and copy out the correct brief by hand or hire a scrivener to do so. In this way, copying mistakes in the standard parts of the brief are obviated, which seems to have been primarily aimed at increasing government efficiency, since one of the common reasons for applications to be suspended was to wait for correction and re-filing.
The War Time Economy Act of 1938 reduced the amount of space dedicated to legal text in the interest of saving paper, since briefs in this period were still folded folios covered with pre-printed texts with but a few blank spaces for the insertion of material information. To reduce paper usage for the apparently rarely-read part of the brief, the legal text was then printed in progressively smaller size until it was barely legible. This was also because the government was actually using much more paper than before the war, hence the desire to cut back on paper used for routine matters.
In 1941, the Brief Headings Act was passed to require the "first line" to be written on the first page of the brief. This is because otherwise the first page was only populated by a canned salutation, which is always "A BRIEF delivered by Your Majesty's subject" (民詣主上皇啻尹書) if it is delivered to any department of the central government other than the Chancery or "A BRIEF delivered for His Majesty's Viceroy in [Province]" (詣邦首書) to a provincial authority. By placing the actual first line of the brief, which contained its purpose, on the first page, it could be put onto the correct desk without being opened.
Revolt
Joint petition and brief
In the brief, the Kien-k'ang Board of Financiers, Chamber of Barristers, Guild of Scriveners, and Governing Board of Notary Attestors jointly asserted that the 1821 statute (viz. Caput 32 ′Er Anno LIX) introduced into the law a large number of anomalies and contradictions which, together with the other effects it produced, made the statute "not worth having on the books" and "to the profit of many rapidly removed, expunged, and reversed".
The primary complaint the four submitters had was that Caput 32 (disharmoniously with the finance-legal establishment) framed a marine's salary as a debt rather than a expense, which, without further legislation, would be charged on the incorrect fund in the imperial treasury. Thus, in its present state, each marine may actually be committing the crime of fraud by receiving funds in the form required by Caput 32, and the requisite seals of scriveners and attestors would be on a formally meritless petition, which is prohibited by the rules of their trade. As the submitters argued, Caput 32 is a statute that places individuals affected by it in impossible positions, i.e. causes them to commit a crime and does not protect them from it.
The reason for this is that the salaries of marines is, at the law, an expense the state by its own laws ought to pay out, but not because it is owed to marines. That is, in more abstract terms, the state has not contracted this debt to the marines in its service and therefore has no debt to honour. Yet Caput 32 directs each marine to submit a claim to the Exchequer, which necessarily implies that they claim the state owes a debt to them while it does not. Thus, the claim being meritless though not fraudulent, their reception of the salary payment has no legal basis, even if the act of submitting the claim has legal basis.
The brief goes on to explain, in very arcane terms, why the state cannot owe money to the marines claiming their salaries. It reviews the historical documents when debt between the crown and his officials is created:
By the Testaments we know that the Crown has declared that a given other person has a valid claim of goods, moneys, and lands against his household for whatever reason. This act of validating a claim, as it entails a transfer of wealth, implicitly creates the roles and entities of title-originator and title-holder; these two things are, by this validation, defined as non-intersecting, distinct persons. That is, one party is the soruce, and other is the destination. If these terms are to have any meaning whatsoever, then they must be conceptually distinct; if the Crown owed a titleholder of his five acres, the Crown cannot simply rob the titleholder of five acres and then give the land back to claim it has settled the debt of five acres. In this scenario, there is no distinct bodies of source and destination. This is why distinct bodies are required if a genuine transfer is to take place between them. Thus, viewed in the ancient lens, the state being a lasting agreement between family-dynasties, it is actually built upon the relationship of debt and delivery. If one is genuinely to give up ownership, and another genuinely to receive ownership, then the two must be distinct; there is no genuine giving if one can simply take back, and there is no genuine receiving if one must surrender.
If one examines the means by which the said marines—or indeed many other classes of the Crown's servants—take their salaries, we see easily this is not the relationship as formerly described. The Crown has never declared marines entitled to anything of his estate, and so it is not within their right to claim against it via a claim petition delivered to the Exchequer, which is charged with the duty of administering the Crown's rights and debts. It has, on the other hand, declared it will give to marines such an amount of money for a given period of service. When this money is given, there is no taking back on account of non-service or poor service, for the payment of that money is not in exchange for service. That is the note and character of largess rather than payment. It is true that if a marine were to have salary withheld, there is recourse, but that is against the misbehaviour of an officer responsible for giving this money to him, not against the crown for not fulfilling a debt.
Resolution
By Caput 4 Kryang II, Caput 32 was repealed. Caput 4 also pardoned anyone who has received any amount from the Exchequer not in excess of what should, by statute, be given to them.