My grinchiest opinion about this game is that I fucking loathe this line. hate it with a passion. everytime I hear it I feel the need to storm Larian's castle with a horde of geese.
Let me explain:
This sentence is wrong. Factually and contextually wrong. The lex talionis doctrine, which you might colloquially know as "an eye for an eye" is one of the oldest rule of law we have surviving evidence of through a basalt stele known as the Code of Hammurabi, found in modern-day Iran, with an estimated date of origin coming in at 1753 BC.
The conceit of the Code is thus: if there is no rule of law, then there is nothing stopping revenge from escalating infinitely. Say a man blinds your brother. You kill the man in revenge. Perhaps you also kill his household. At which point his own brother is entitled to revenge against you, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam. What the Code of Hammurabi proposes (or settles into writing: we really don't have enough archeological evidence to really know what societal tensions permeated babylonian society almost four thousand years ago) is to put the brakes on: a man blinds your brother, and you get to blind the man in return. THAT'S IT. You do not get to do unto him and his worse than was done unto you and yours. (Unless the injured party is of higher social class than the offender, but that's irrelevant for the point at hand.)
This is called exact retaliation. It fit its purpose, which was to ensure a minimum of social cohesion in a society where justice was essentially private and the kingly apparatus was only called upon to chime in when things were either deadlocked or out of hand. Nowadays, as it's considered a bit gauche to go around poking people's eyes out, most places in the world have outsourced justice towards the state: you waive your right to go do violence upon the offender yourself and expect that the justice system will right the injustice according to the moral standards of your society. That is (part of) the social contract Rousseau is on about.
Still with me? Okay, let's bring it back to the game. Balduran's statue will consider the trial successful and utter this line if you decide that the red-haired man's theft of an astrolabe (a valuable artifact) should be met with a prison sentence of indeterminate yet finite duration (definitely less than five years, based on context clues). Only... you can argue about the proportional nature of the sentence in this case until the cows come home, but one thing you absolutely cannot say for a fact is that lex talionis is what was applied here.
(I was curious and looked up if Hammurabi had anything to say about thieves, and, uh: "If any one is committing a robbery and is caught, then he shall be put to death." (L. W. King translation). So, if one were following Babylonian rules, the hanging is the sentence that should be chosen.
Also note that while lex talionis is included in the Code of Hammurabi, not all of the Code is lex talionis: this rule pertains specifically to assaults here. If we wanted to imagine a lex talionis-type sentencing in this particular case, realisitically our red-haired man would be enslaved with a debt equivalent to the value of the object he stole.)
What was actually applied here is the principle of proportionality ("the punishment should fit the crime"). But proportionality is emphatically not exact retaliation (and thank fuck for that), so where the fuck did Larian get lex talionis? Did no one google the random latin terminology they were throwing in?? Did no one proof-read this???
I realize I am probably the one person in the entire world who cares about that but come oooooon. I'm not even a law historian and even I know that's comically wrong like seriously what the fuck happened Larian. I will forgive a lot of cartoonishly bad law in service to the setting (and, do not get me wrong: there is A Lot of very bad law in BG3) but I will NOT forgive throwing random latin and hoping no one notices. This is D&D! make up a language! Hell, use elvish if only to make something vaguely interesting out of retconning Balduran into an elf. Do literally anything but invoke the oldest and most famous real-life law principle incorrectly, what the shit.
(Also I know no one cares, but like both the chamber of Justice trial and chamber of Insight trial are entirely bullshit, criminal law- and law of war-wise. Red-haired man who's your defense attorney I just want to chat I swear-)
