The Laws That Changed the Jedi and Republic Forever

“For a over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic,” Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker in A New Hope. In the decades of Star Wars storytelling since, countless tales have fleshed out that connection between the Galactic Republic and the Jedi Order’s service of it, from its highest highs to the lows that tore them both apart in the fires of the Empire’s rise.

But while a thousand generations span much of the unseen ancient history of Star Wars well beyond the circumstances we find the Republic and the Jedi in by the time of the prequels, the status quo introduced in those films—where the Republic and the Jedi are enmeshed akin to separations of church and state in our own world—is not quite so ancient.

In both current Star Wars continuity and (much more extensively) in its former expanded universe material, the transition between the long history of the Old Republic—the ancient entity that had shaped the galaxy for tens of thousands of years, often locked into conflict with resurgent Sith Empires—and our understanding of the “modern” Republic comes approximately 1,000 years before the events of the Skywalker Saga. And they are both defined by the same name: the Ruusan Reformations.

In contemporary Star Wars canon, little is known about the specifics of the reformations, beyond the fact it was a series of legislative packages that significantly curtailed the power of the office of the Republic’s Supreme Chancellor—a level of power that would not be granted to that office again until the Clone War. But in the Expanded Universe, the Ruusan Reformations represent a transformative moment in galactic history: a moment that did not just reshape the Republic, but forever changed the Jedi Order’s place in it.

The Dark Age

The period of time prior to the Ruusan Reformations was one of existential crisis for the Galactic Republic. For a thousand years, the galaxy had once again been thrust into a cataclysmic conflict between the Republic and a resurrected Sith Empire, established by Darth Ruin during the fourth Great Schism between the Jedi and the Sith.

The New Sith Wars, as they would come to be known, were a series of interstellar campaigns that radically reshaped the power balance of the galaxy. The Sith Empire surged dramatically in power with its re-establishment, taking over swaths of the galaxy as the Republic was beaten back to the brink of extinction multiple times. Thousands upon thousands of Republic member worlds were abandoned to the Sith as the Republic retreated further and further towards the galactic core, and in doing so, the economic and industrial systems that had supported its vast expansion crumbled, as corruption and lawlessness broke down the fabric of galactic civilization.

The final century of the New Sith Wars were known in particular as the Dark Age of the Republic. Beyond the impact the Sith Empire’s upper hand had on its structure as its size and scope was drastically reduced, the Republic was heavily diminished through layers of political and industrial corruption and outbreaks of disease, as well as a breakdown of key logistical systems like the HoloNet, rendering the vast majority of real-time galactic communication impossible, and the deactivation of hyperspace lanes to the Outer Rim.

But there was another significant issue: as a leading faction in the war against the Sith, the Jedi Order itself had increasingly assumed much of the legislative and military branches of the Republic. Jedi served as Supreme Chancellors with sweeping political power, or banded together to form governmental bodies and defense forces across individual sectors of space. Even the Republic’s own standing armies and navies came more and more under the direct control of the Jedi, effectively making the order the de facto galactic power against the Sith Empire.

By the last decade of the Dark Age, the Sith themselves had similarly diminished, fracturing over a series of internal feuds and civil wars, before the Sith Lord Skere Kaan, a fallen Jedi Master, reforged the remaining Sith into the Brotherhood of Darkness. Launching another war against the weakened Jedi and Republic, the Brotherhood was eventually beaten back into a years-long series of engagements on the planet Ruusan.

Culminating in the seventh and final battle of the Ruusan campaign, the Sith were believed to be eradicated from the galaxy once more with the deployment of a catastrophic, Force-attuned Sith weapon known as the Thought Bomb. With the sacrifice of a final hundred Jedi, the New Sith Wars were over… and it was time to reshape the Republic forever in an attempt to assure another galactic civil war between the Jedi and Sith could never happen again.

The Reformation of the Republic…

The legislative restructuring of the Galactic Republic that would come to be named the Ruusan Reformations for the world where the New Sith Wars finally came to an end was enacted by the then-Supreme Chancellor, Tarsus Valorum. Born from the same political dynasty that would eventually give us the Republic’s final Chancellor before Palpatine, Finis, Tarsus Valorum was the first non-Jedi Supreme Chancellor elected to the office in over 400 years by the time the Sith-Jedi conflict ended on Ruusan.

Valorum’s reformation did not radically overhaul the structure of the Republic’s governing body—there would still be a Supreme Chancellor and a Galactic Senate, as there had been for thousands of years beforehand—but they did significantly redistribute power away from the office of the Chancellor and back into the representative democracy of the Senate.

In order to do so, the Ruusan Reformations redrew the Senate’s representative districts from millions of sectors into just 1,024. While increased power remained in the galactic core among founding member worlds to ensure they received individual representation, this realignment significantly decentralized the power of the Senate back out through the inner and outer rim of the galaxy. It also, for the first time, allowed both cultural and corporate entities to seek individual representation in the Senate (a move that would eventually see the Republic’s decline into corruption once more, centuries later).

… and the Transformation of the Jedi

But while the impact on the structure of the Republic itself was minimal, the Ruusan Reformations radically altered the Jedi Order’s position in the galaxy. As part of the process, the Jedi acquiesced to sweeping demilitarization and depoliticization reform, in a bid to prove to the Republic and the galaxy at large that the Order would not become an interstellar military organization in its own right after the defeat of the Sith.

As well as blocking Jedi from holding political office as they previously had done, the Ruusan Reformations effectively stripped the Jedi of almost all their martial power. Jedi military ranks and standard battle armor were stripped from the Order, and the vast armies, navies, and starfighter corps under the Order’s direct control were disbanded. The Jedi themselves were placed under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Chancellor and the Republic’s Judiciary branch, which became the primary law enforcement body of the galaxy and the replacement of the Republic’s standing armies leaving the Republic itself demilitarized, heralding an era of relative galactic peace until the creation of the Clone Army almost a thousand years later.

In an attempt to stop another resurgence of the Sith, the reformation process also overhauled Jedi recruitment and teaching policies. Not only did the Order enact policies that demanded Jedi be recruited and trained from a young age—ending the direct induction of adults into the Order—those same policies centralized Jedi training on Coruscant, in an attempt to maintain oversight and prevent students from exploring forbidden Sith teachings in secret.

Why the Ruusan Reformations Existed in the First Place

Within the universe of Star Wars, the Ruusan Reformations would come to represent a landmark moment in galactic history, the transition of an ancient era into the more familiar time period of Star Wars movies. But in reality, the creation of the Reformations in the old EU largely existed to try and canonically reconcile two lines of dialogue: the aforementioned “thousand generations” line from A New Hope, and the arrival of the prequel trilogy and Attack of the Clones in particular, where Palpatine states that the Republic had “stood for a thousand years” when discussing the Republic’s attempted negotiations with separatist systems.

Before the status quo of the Jedi Order and Republic was introduced in the prequel trilogy, the Star Wars expanded universe had largely only explored the era of the Old Republic in terms of its ancient history, thousands and thousands of years before the events of the movies, through works like the Tales of the Jedi comic series, a period popularized even further through the Knights of the Old Republic video game series releasing alongside the prequels.

What is now known as “Legends” material was informally structured in Star Wars canon through a series of tiers, each one taking priority over those below it. At the top of this structure was the canon of the six Star Wars films, starting with the original trilogy and then incorporating the prequels. This was eventually updated with the arrival of a secondary tier representing the Clone Wars 3DCG animated series when it launched in 2008, which sat over the tier that represented the vast majority of contemporary Expanded Universe material (two further tiers existed below this, representing secondary and retconned EU material and stories deemed explicitly non-canonical).

The introduction of Palpatine’s line about the Republic existing for a thousand years in the movie canon (and commentary in The Phantom Menace that the Republic had not seen interstellar conflict on the level of the invasion of Naboo since its formation) sat in contradiction with the Expanded Universe’s exploration of the Republic era, which had told stories of endless conflict between the Jedi, Republic, and Sith across a period that spanned 25,000 years of ancient history.

First explicitly covered in the 2007 novel Darth Bane: Rule of Two—which also introduced the titular “Rule of Two” concept for the Sith, aligning their status quo in the prequel trilogy with the existence of the Sith Empires of the Expanded Universe—the Ruusan Reformation brought these two tiers of continuity into relative harmony, providing a dividing line between what would be known formally as the Old Republic and the Republic as it was seen in the prequels.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.