Star Wars: 10 Strange Laws ALL Empire Employees Follow

For all the hee-hawing over the Dark Side of the Force and the Sith, the real, monolithic villain at the core of the Star Wars franchise is the Galactic Empire, or as it would later morph into, the First Order.

The Empire is of course the interminably oppressive regime that seeks to rule over the entire galaxy by any means necessary, most frequently at the behest of Emperor Palpatine.

But amid the huge scale of Star Wars' central conflict, it's easy to lose sight of the little guy - the Imperial officers and lower-tier employees to whom working for Palpatine is really just another day at the office.

Kevin Smith's Clerks covered the ethics of contractors working for the Empire years ago, but what about the more day-to-day typicality of making a living with the organisation?

Whether you're a Stormtrooper, a petty officer, or an Imperial doctor, the various job titles on the Empire's payroll are all bound by a series of laws, rules, and regulations which restrict and dictate their behaviour.

These 10 laws, whether understandable within the context of an autocratic regime or not - and whether part of the official Star Wars canon or simply implied within the non-canon "Legends" continuity - all come across as incredibly bizarre to an outsider.

And yet, given the Empire's no-nonsense attitude to deserters and dissenters, only the most foolish would ever dare challenge them...

Empire-employed assassins and bounty hunters have of course appeared countless times across Star Wars media, but did you know that there are actually official Imperial guidelines about their rules of engagement?

The mandated practises for Empire-sponsored assassins originated in the 1996 short story "Payback: The Tale of Dengar," which while technically now part of the Legends continuity, like every other Legends entry on this list doesn't conflict with anything in the post-2014 continuity, so can be reasonably used to fill in the blanks of the lore, if you like.

Section 2127 of the Imperial Penal Code - typically referred to as the Imperial Legal Code in more recent Star Wars media - states that assassins working for the Empire are legally obliged to inform their assassination target that they have been hired to kill them.

Furthermore, the code dictates that the assassin must give their mark a weapon, because the target has a legal right to defend their life, and wait three minutes to kill them, so they have a short head-start to try and make their escape.

It's a weirdly honourable ruling from the Empire, really.