Ormiss said:
In my eyes, this is a fatal problem with "Lawful Good," because I personally feel that the law can, in many situations, counter-act the good. The whole point of Lawful Evil is that the person abuses, without breaking, a lawful system to commit acts of evil.
Of course, it could be construed that the paladin only obeys divine law. If you subscribe to that notion, nevermind my ramblings.
Allow me to ramble a bit, myself.
There is a common misconception about the Lawful alignment - so common, in fact, that I've even seen the
paid authors of RPG books screw it up from time to time.
"Lawful" doesn't have doesn't have a lot to do with following the laws of men or gods! (There
is a connection, but it is less direct, and I'll touch on it in a moment.) It is an internal, behavioral descriptor - it refers to whether or not a person has an internal set of rules and organizational ideas
for themselves that are relatively immutable. As opposed to someone who either does not have such rules, or for whom those rules frequently change or are ignored - someone with a "Chaotic" behavior, in other words.
The Rogue that steals whatever, whenever, as the mood hits them, with NO regard for anyone (not even bad regard, as in
wanting to hurt people) and no particular rules for himself is Chaotic Something, probably Neutral. The Rogue that
never steals from children, the elderly, the crippled, or anyone who has his own militia
, who
never steals from another Rogue unless that Rogue stole from him first, who
always leaves his victims with enough silver for their next meal - the Rogue that has a general Code inside himself that he is dedicated to, in other words - is probably
Lawful Neutral.
(Twisted as it may seem, the Rogue who is
dedicated to an internal general Code that includes things like
never allowing someone to insult him without taking something they value away from them, who
only commits his crimes on evenly numbered dates, and who
always makes certain he knows someone's name before he kills them to take their stuff - well, he's
Lawful Evil.)
The reason it frequently seems that Lawful characters will identify with the laws of men or of a particular church is because it usually (but not always) takes a Lawful minded character to come up with a general Code of laws, and since the Lawful mind follows a logic system, other Lawful characters are likely to understand and incorporate that logic - especially in situations where they may have been raised having that logic laid on top of their Lawful nature before they developed their own logics, or where (as in the case of many Paladin/Cleric characters) their own internal Code indicates taking up Duty to a greater cause, including taking up aspects of that Duty that might have never developed within themselves. Also because of the logical nature of Law, a Lawful character with no preconceptions on a particular subject who is entering a land with laws regarding that subject (say, a LN Ranger entering lands with slavery when he has never heard of it) is likely to internalize the logic of those laws - make them his own, so to speak - unless they contradict his Good/Neutral/Evil axis.
My point in all of this is that whether or not Sir Cedric's behavior is
Lawful Good or not isn't as simple as comparing it to some imaginary objective standard. We need to know: A. What the law of the land he was raised in was, and whether he would have good reason to have rejected the laws of that land. B. What the laws of the land he is currently in are, and whether he (or his church) feel any particular need to abide by them. C. What the laws of his church are, and D. What Sir Cedric's own internal Code (beyond that he has obviously taken on the Duty to and code of his church) looks like.
To be honest, Sir Cedric seems to me almost like a Chaotic Good character who is
just barely Lawful enough to have agreed to take up the Duty of being a Paladin - now that he has, he is determined to follow through on what that means, obligation-wise, but he just really doesn't
feel his church's or his deity's code. But there is one thing about being a Paladin that goes beyond the alignment requirement -
his deity called him - and so long as that deity sees him as a fit servant to empower as a Paladin, for whatever reason, that is what he is.
Like I said, I've seen the authors, even ones at TSR/Wizards, screw this up before, and I sincerely believe my way of looking at it works better. After all, if Lawful meant always having to respect "the proper authorities" all the time, you'd have to ride all over the Good/Neutral/Evil spectrum to stay Lawful, just depending on what town you're riding through! And if you look at their alignment definitions, they make it look like the "Lawful" in Lawful Good means something different than the "Lawful" in Lawful Evil. I'm sorry, but Lawful should mean the same concept regardless of whatever else you tack on - but maybe that's just my Lawful nature coming out. 
