Before drafting specific statutes or hearing cases, the foundational theorists of the Institute of Multiversal Jurisprudence had to confront a series of philosophical and practical nightmares. How do you define personhood when an entity might be a collective hive-mind in one universe and a fragmented temporal echo in another? How do you assess culpability when cause and effect can be reversed or circular in certain cosmological models? The solution was the development of a set of key axioms—starting assumptions deemed necessary for any coherent legal system to function across dimensional boundaries. These are not proven but agreed upon, the constitutional bedrock of the entire endeavor.
This axiom states that for legal purposes, an entity's identity is tied to its continuous conscious narrative, or 'world-line of experience,' rather than its specific material or energetic composition. This allows a being who transfers their consciousness from a biological body to a crystalline matrix, or who exists simultaneously in multiple probability states, to be recognized as the same legal person. It also addresses the troubling issue of temporal duplicates or 'alt-selves' from forked timelines; each is granted distinct personhood from the moment of divergence, preventing one from being held liable for the actions of another, though they may share pre-divergence heritage.
Perhaps the most debated axiom, it asserts that core concepts of benefit, harm, rights, and welfare, while culturally expressed in infinitely varied ways, possess a translatable essence that can be understood and weighed across ontological divides. An act that causes suffering in a universe of physical beings is recognized as having negative moral valence, even if the perpetrator is from a universe where suffering is an abstract aesthetic concept. This does not impose one morality but creates a common metric for evaluating the impact of cross-boundary actions. Jurists must then perform the complex hermeneutic work of translating local expressions of value into this common framework.
This practical axiom demands that all participating realities agree to uphold a standardized model of causality within IMJ proceedings, even if it contradicts their local physics. This 'legal causality' is a simplified, linear chain of events used to establish facts for a trial. Parties from acausal universes must, for the duration of proceedings, present their case within this model. It is a procedural fiction, akin to assuming good faith in negotiations, but it is essential for establishing a shared narrative of events upon which judgment can be based. Appeals can be made to the Chamber of Axioms if this fiction is deemed to grossly distort justice for a particular entity.
Extending the Principle of Recursive Legitimacy, this axiom formalizes that any law or judgment rendered by an IMJ court must be applicable to the court itself. A ruling on dimensional pollution, for instance, would equally constrain the Institute's own research facilities. This builds in a self-correcting mechanism and is intended to prevent the IMJ from becoming a tyrannical supra-authority. Enforcement of this axiom falls to a separate, rotating Oversight Convocation composed of jurists from realities currently not serving in the main chambers.
These axioms are constantly stress-tested by new cases. A recent challenge involved a universe where information is the only substance: was the theft of a 'memory-construct' property theft, assault, or something else entirely? The axioms provided the framework to even begin the debate, anchoring a dizzying ontological problem to a stable legal foundation. They are the compass by which the Institute navigates the infinite.