Legally Citizens

"Hey, Sing-Sing - can you tell us anything about the Citizen Legal system?"
  "We have one. I think. Maybe."
  "Mechanic, not lawyer, right. Is there anything you care to talk about today? We haven't interviewer you in a while, and I certainly don't want to lose out on your people's generosity by not upholding our end of the deal."
  "Actually, Mr. Hobbes, I can talk about the law a bit - I know my sarcasm and simply not knowing can run together. The thing is - we have three."
  "A repeat of the guild, family, and nation split loyalty I take it?"
  "Precisely. It is possible to find a situation where you could say murder someone, and be found guilty of a transgression against a family, but not seen as compromising your guild in doing it, and possibly even aiding your nation. Thus you could be fined or arrested, even spend time in prison, but keep your job, and have expenses taken care of by the state. Obviously, not too many people are happy with this system - and there are attempts to reform it to a single system. There is also something akin to your bounty hunters who try to quietly enforce the "justice" other courts won't. And there are of course long running feuds and shadow-wars and reprisals. Basically, I'm on the colonization fleet because my sibling who was supposed to be here was assassinated, and I didn't want to stick around for the next round of murders."
  "Is it common for Citizens to be as disenfranchised with the system as you are?"
  "To borrow a human phrase - I'm a young radical. Things have worked for a long time, and the situation I gave above is an edge case. Once again, the whole colony effort is an attempt to either broker peace between citizens, or get the warring parties separated by enough distance that fighting is impractical. Obviously, there was some progress, or we wouldn't be funding these sorts of things."
  "You have clue as to the scale of the colonization project?"
  "There is more than one colony fleet, but I believe we're the biggest. Citizens reproduce rather fast when they want to. Or when you don't want them too. Same thing really."
  "uh-huh."
  "Something like twelve were planned - enough to be sponsored by each major family, but you're not lucky enough to receive the first, and its unlikely they'll do much more after ours - so I'm on fleet three and will probably never know if they get as far as five."
  "You're sounding pretty depressed by that statement. People back home you still want to see?"
  "Very much so."
  "Lets take five, find a way to turn this into a presentation, and maybe add more later, OK?"