that jurisdiction is set in stone as only protecting the cities. that's not technically what the helpfile states. The helpfile first states the "laws of the land" (hint, not laws of the cities). Second it says the cities are "protected by the jurisdiction" of the Spire. If you take the plain meaning of the language, that means that cities are protected, but that doesn't mean that the Spire's jurisdiction doesn't exceed that.

This argument is further supported by the fact that the laws themselves (except the important one that is in contention, rule #3) explicitly state the area in which these crimes must be committed (i.e. in a protected area, or in the Spire). The laws leave out, interestingly, any sort of explicit bounded area for rule #3. So one can argue that it was the intention of the initial framers of the laws that rule #3 is not bound to only protected areas. A pretty compelling argument, on the condition that you assume that the writers were smart.

An opposing argument is that you just assume the writers were careless, or you take a position of history. the first is that the writers had intended to mean everything, including the "protected by the jurisdiction" phrase to intend that the jurisdiction of the Spire was solely supposed to be the cities (which I guess I have to disagree with since you see rule #4 suddenly extend the jurisdiction of the Spire to the Spire itself. So that means that jurisdiction does, to whatever extent, go beyond just the cities.)

The second part is that in the past it has been the precedent that Rule #3 was interpreted as only being in cities, and that there should be no change.

The final position you can take is a policy argument. That it's just a dumb idea to suddenly implement a change when it could undermine the authority of the Spire and that it in fact will increase the number of attacks within cities, and cause discontent, especially when it's such a hard law to implement. This angering of the masses is clearly seen by posts where people vocally dislike this change of interpretation, and is only enjoyed by tribunals who enjoy mincing over what a word means while smoking a cigar and drinking a scotch rather than actual consequences of their decisions.

Personally, unless you decide that the writers had no idea of the consequences of the wording of the laws (which I think is true to some degree), there's compelling reasons to believe that rule #3 extends beyond city walls. I also think that the policy argument is just as compelling of an argument to not take up this interpretation.