Scott Alexander takes us through a whirlwind tour of David Friedman’s book, hopefully soon to be published but available in draft form here, titled Legal Systems Very Different From Ours.
I often find myself impatient with Alexander’s meandering style but either this long review doesn’t meander or I find the topic so interesting that I didn’t notice. The whole thing is well worth reading.
But a few highlights:
Medieval Icelandic crime victims would sell the right to pursue a perpetrator to the highest bidder. 18th century English justice replaced fines with criminals bribing prosecutors to drop cases. Somali judges compete on the free market; those who give bad verdicts get a reputation that drives away future customers.
“Anarcho-capitalism” evokes a dystopian cyberpunk future. But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe we’ve always been anarcho-capitalist. Maybe a state-run legal system isn’t a fact of nature, but a historical oddity as contingent as collectivized farming or nationalized railroads. Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, by anarcho-capitalist/legal scholar/medieval history buff David Friedman, successfully combines the author’s three special interests into a whirlwind tour of exotic law.
I just realized that I picked up “whirlwind tour” from this second paragraph.
Some insightful humor:
First, something kept seeming off about all the legal systems mentioned, which only clicked into place about halfway through: they really, really didn’t seem prepared for crime. A lot of them worked on a principle like: “If there’s a crime, we’ll call together a court made of all the town elders, plus at least three different religious leaders, plus the heads of the families of everybody involved, plus a representative of the Great King, plus nine different jurists from nine different universities, and all of them will meet on the Field Of Meeting, and a great tent will be erected, and…” The whole thing sounded like it might work as long as there was like one crime a year. Any more than that and none of the society’s officials would ever have time for anything else.
More insightful humor:
Whenever I read a book by anyone other than David Friedman about a foreign culture, it sounds like “The X’wunda give their mother-in-law three cows every monsoon season, then pluck out their own eyes as a sacrifice to Humunga, the Volcano God”.
And whenever I read David Friedman, it sounds like “The X’wunda ensure positive-sum intergenerational trade by a market system in which everyone pays the efficient price for continued economic relationships with their spouse’s clan; they demonstrate their honesty with a costly signal of self-mutilation that creates common knowledge of belief in a faith whose priests are able to arbitrate financial disputes.”
READER COMMENTS
Bedarz Iliachi
Nov 15 2017 at 3:43am
A fine article that raises many interesting questions.
The article supports the idea that justice is invariably a public or community affair and that only a community can mete out justice to the offenders. And it is the political community that can mete out justice in its fullest sense –thus limited justice systems of communities like Amish, gypsies and Orthosox Jews.
Scott Alexender writes:
Perhaps but they may certainly have extra-economic reasons to punish. Desire for justice or even revenge?
I tend to the view that the victim of the crime has no authority to punish a putative wrong-doer for nobody can be a judge in his own case. It is only the community with its justice system, centralized or dispersed as the case may be, that has the moral authority to punish.
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