User blog comment:Benihime101/Central 46 is alive?/@comment-1454424-20101020011906

@Kuro sensei mi, Amusing but you betray a lack of understanding of the diversity of political and legal systems that are in existence in the world today.

Soul Society is a monarchy in that it has a king but it was made clear the king was a figurehead. It is not a dictatorship. The proper term for Soul Society's setup is an "oligarchy". Oligarchy's generally do not allow appeal processes as the oligarchy itself has the final say in everything.

In addition, there are two types of law systems in operation in the world today. The one practised in the US and UK is an adversarial system/common law system that "presumes innocence until proven guilty" and allows defence, cross examinations etc, etc. However, the other law system is called "civil system" works different and "presumes guilt until proven innocent". In this system, the judge controls the trial, questions all witnesses and the lawyers are there to help the judge gather evidence to make his decision. The lawyers do not mount a defence as such. They mere provide evidence to the contrary. Japan operate under a civil law system. Therefore, for Soul Society, Kubo also implemented a civil law system and under that law system, Urahara wouldn't be able to mount a defence as American's would understand it. However, he could offer up contradictory evidence. Due to Aizen's perfect hypnosis, Urahara didn't have any contradictory evidence to present. Therefore, under the civil law system, the trials we have seen to data in SS are perfectly legitimate and while it is true that they don't observe "innocence until proven guilty", neither does the majority of the world as the civil system is by en-large the dominant legal system practised in most of Europe and many Asian, African and South African's countries.

As for the Shinigami Academy, I don't know about the US but most Universities here in Australia are not under the jurisdiction of the State. Universities in Australia are created under federal law and because of this, they are considered crown land as controlled by the federal government. The state government and its agents can only interfere when invited to do so by the University itself. Therefore, it not unusual for the Shinigami Academy to be outside of the control of Central 46. General, "seats of knowledge" are given a certain amount of freedom and independence from government control.