> If a fact is disputed, or supported by fewer than three witnesses, parties may be required to swear one of several different oaths to the truth of their position. One such oath consists of the oath-giver swearing by his marriage; if it later turns out that his oath was false, the marriage is dissolved.
I hate to think what happens if you swear on your mother's life...
It would be interesting to know how successful the system was. I read a translation of the Icelandic Njal's Saga which deals with the traditional Icelandic legal system. What the book describes is basically a decades long blood feud. They had a system of fines for offenses including murder, but the verdicts never settled anything and they just kept killing one another as bags of money went back and forth.
An acquaintance on another forum suggested this relevant passage from Friedman's "Machinery of Freedom" [1]:
There is a scene in Njal's Saga that provides striking evidence of this stability. Conflict between two groups has
become so intense that open fighting threatens to break out in the middle of the court. A leader of one faction asks a
benevolent neutral what he will do for them in case of a fight. He replies that if they start losing he will help them, and
if they are winning he will break up the fight before they kill more men than they can afford. Even when the system
appears to be breaking down, it is still assumed that every enemy killed must eventually be paid for. The reason is
obvious enough; each man killed will have friends and relations who are still neutral— and will remain neutral if and
only if the killing is made up for by an appropriate wergeld.
Our main sources of information on the Icelandic system are the sagas, a group of histories and historical novels
written in Iceland, mostly in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. On first reading, they seem to describe
quite a violent society. That is hardly surprising. At least since Homer, the spectacle of people killing each other has
been one of the principal ways in which writers entertain their audience. The chief innovation of the saga writers was
to spend as much time on law suits as on the violent conflicts that generated them. The one error in the quotation from
Bryce with which I started this chapter is the claim that the chief occupation of Icelanders was killing each other. The
chief occupation of the characters of the sagas appears to be suing each other; the killings merely provide something to
litigate about.
A more careful reading of the sagas tells a different story. The violence, unlike that in contemporary accounts
elsewhere in Europe, is on a very small scale. The typical encounter in a saga feud involves only a handful of people
on each side; everyone killed or injured is named. When two such encounters occur in consecutive chapters of a saga it
seems as though the feuding is continual—until you notice that a character not yet born at the time of the first
encounter is participating in the second as an adult. The saga writers telescope the action, skipping over the years that
separate the interesting parts.
> The death penalty for murder is understandable, even if you don't agree with it.
I love reading specifics of other cultures, exposing as they do the values that I mistakenly understood to be universal. Even secular, Enlightenment ideas are informed by Christian ideals regarding sin, salvation, forgiveness and redemption; I, not a Christian, nevertheless "hold these truths to be self-evident". A culture without that tradition no doubt finds our Western system to be at least as bizarre.
Even so, our own legal system is less concerned with lofty ideas of Justice than it is with maintaining order and stability. If you read through this system again in that light, all of it seems quite rational. A society in which there is no central authority decides transgression and punishment based on centuries of tradition, a history of trial-and-error, so to speak.
> But killing other innocent people as a penalty for murder is indefensible, even if they are from the same family as the murderer.
From the perspective of the legal system, the family is not innocent: they produced and raised a murderer and outlaw. For the sake of the broader community, the family must be corrected.
It depends on perspective. We in the west generally have a "no innocent lives lost ever" perspective. But sometimes "minimize total societal damage" looks pretty good too.
Is it better to live in a world where 1000 murders happen a year and half the murderers escape punishment because they ran, or one with 100 murders where 10 ran and family members were killed in their place? That's a lot less deaths!
Nuclear MAD is an extreme example of this - it's very obviously immoral to kill a few million civilians in retaliation for the murder of other civilians. But that's what MAD is! And in practice, it's likely prevented millions of deaths due to war.
The problem is, it is not clear that deterrance works for very serious crimes like murder. AFAIK murder rates are the same or higher in countries with harsher penalties. I could imagine it is very difficult to determine how the causality is. To maximize societal peace, it might be more beneficial to completely tabooize killing another person (including death penalty) and deal in another way with murderers.
It is also not clear if nuclear MAD actually "works". It is a convenient story to justify cold war security measures and military spending.
The deterrance value of promising a second strike is high, but the actual military gain of performing the second strike is small. States are strongly incentivized to announce MAD, but to not actually go through with it. If you are defeated by a first strike and cannot win the war conventionally, it is more logical to surrender unconditionally than to render the world uninhabitable. When it was clear that Germany would lose WW2, Hitler issued the Nero Decree and ordered the self-destruction of German infrastructure, but even the radicalized Germans didn't go though with it.
To add to this, the actual war plans of NATO and Warsaw Pact were centered around swift tank warfare in central Europe. Nuclear weapons were supposed to be used tactically, to deny ground and to destroy groups of tanks. But of course the US military preferred to talk about their awesome power to hit Russian cities, rather than about their plans to deploy nuclear mines in the middle of West Germany.
Hitler's order for the German people to basically suicide didn't go through because it wouldn't have hindered the Allies at all, and everything would have sucked even more afterwards. The Germans were already concerned that the Allies would completely dismantle German civilization, and the latter were actually considering doing that for a time. Why help them with that?
After a nuclear strike, most population centers would be glassed and something like 70% or more of the urban population would be dead. As a survivor of the attacked nation, I would feel more than entitled to strike back. Maybe not at the entire world though.
Anyways, there would be no long, agonizing consideration whether to strike back or not, just semi-automated protocols to confirm and trigger a counterstrike. And dead hand protocols in case central control was eliminated.
Using nukes tactically in tank warfare would have eventually escalated to their strategic use. It was just a question of time since frontlines don't just freeze in conveniently unpopulated territory, but will eventually reach population centres.
Edit: Of course it is not possible to prove that MAD "works". In the case of an escalation, mutual destruction would prove that it didn't work. And the current "peace" can be plausibly argued to have come about anyways. But that's not really the point of MAD. In WW2, nukes were use to force an entrenched enemy nation to surrender. This use of nuclear weapons was indeed obsolete once all potential targets had their own nukes and could strike back if somebody tries to Hiroshima them.
Actually some of hitlers suicide orders went through. Germany relief on plundering Europe until the late stages of war. Then they converted all fertilizer fabrication to ammonition. Even if Germany had won 1945,they would have starved, because actually there were no measures taken for life to continue. Still got better of then the rest of Europe they laid to waste for insanity.
Replace "family" with "nation" and you could see how some of these come to be - older nation-states are really collections of various "families" who each may wield immense power compared to a "nuclear" family. And said families have internal policing, etc.
Almost like what "family" would mean in the Godfather movies.
Well the murder of Franz Ferdinand resulted in the death of 20 million people.
We may have technology and laws but we sometimes still act like super violent monkeys, and the funny thing is we only realize our mistakes when it's over then we repeat the same thing a couple decade later when we forget the pain of it.
It's easily defensible - people in this society organize themselves into familial clans, which are viewed as the atomic unit of society. Individuals are more subatomic particles.
That's not how we do it in the West generally, so yes, importing those punishments seems barbaric, but that's just because you may not ride or die with your family, defer all major decisions to your elders, etc.
> Finally the authorities handed down a change to the system: the plaintiff and defendant would agree on two lawyers to conduct the trial. Then the judge would flip a coin, and one of the two would be assigned at random to each party.
This seems very interesting...I wonder what the game theoretic optimal strategy is and how the analysis would change if
Here is how I'd game the system: I'd sue somebody (like a neighbor) for violating my rights in some way. Then I'd bring a really bad lawyer to court, and take a 50/50 chance on giving that lawyer to my opponent.
If I end up with the bad lawyer, I lose the case, and move onto my next victim.
If lawyers have different levels of skill with respect to defence and prosecution, picking a strong defence lawyer with weak ability to prosecute is a pretty sound bet
If I get my lawyer, I get a great defence lawyer to get me off all charges. If the other side get my lawyer, a great defence lawyer is doing a pretty inept job of trying to prosecute me.
I enjoyed that parody, but it kind of misses the most parody-able bit of all of the libertarian polycentric law research project; the general assumption that these systems are superior for not involving a state (not explicit here, but certainly true of David Friedman and Van Notten in general)
"Examples throughout history prove the state is not only inherently evil, but also unnecessary to provide satisfactory legal resolutions. For example, in U̵t̵o̵p̵i̵a̵ Somaliland satisfactory resolutions are ensured by independent judges free to make up their own legal principles, murder is deterred by having suspected murderers' family members executed (if they're too poor to pay the fine), clans claim the right to extract larger fines for the same offence if committed by outsiders and judgements may either be accepted or enforced by vendetta"
Might be interesting to note that the Somali courts united as a network (officially after 2000 or so) and became a real legal system that could have been the basis for a stable government, until the CIA destroyed the network for excluding its favorite warlords.
Not really, since the sharia-based Islamic Court Union that briefly established control over the Mogadishu region in 2006 in between the "Transitional Federal Government" periods was separate both conceptually and geographically from somewhat-secular Somali clan law in Somaliland/Puntland that Van Notten wrote about.
(And much as there's a certain school of thought that's determined to make literally everything about the USA, I suspect the 30,000 Ethopian troops invading in support of the TFG had more impact on the ICU's collapse - and subsequent assimiliation into the new government - than anything the CIA or Bush government did)
Re: "Dealing With Foreigners: A Case: The state of Ethiopia dealt with as a clan"
The opposite also happens, with Ethiopia treating Somaliland as a centralized state and trying to find a single counterparty for cross-border cooperation to make things legible. E.g. when one private utility operator in Somaliland wanted to import electricity from the Ethiopian state-owned power company, the Ethiopian side urged the many different Somali utilities to form a single entity for the deal: https://www.capitalethiopia.com/2022/09/25/somaliland-forms-...
Isn't it interesting how the social or traditional rules of a people, the software, if you will, are a big factor in whether the country will be successful or not?
What’s especially interesting is that so many people in Silicon Valley who know culture matters for companies purport to believe that culture doesn’t matter for social groups.
> The dia-paying group’s membership and internal rules are defined by explicit contract.12 In most cases it is made up of a number of jiffo-paying groups, each of which may consist of the descendants in the paternal line of a single common ancestor, or several such.
The jiffo-paying group is a subset of dia-paying group
No one here has commented on the content of the link, leading me to suspect none of the commenters have read it. Which makes sense, this is a short book’s worth of content. It doesn’t make sense for a HN post. For the 0.01% of folks who read it, what’s in it? Is it interesting?
tldr political systems in other countries are different
> Judges are not officials with a position and salary but arbitrators accepted by the disputants. A judge has no special rights,16 such as the right to summon or cross-examine a witness. Nor is the judge viewed as an authoritative source of law. His job is to settle conflicts by applying the rules that people in the community normally observe. A judge who produces verdicts that meet general disapproval is unlikely to be asked to judge cases in the future.
> Neither politicians nor religious dignitaries are responsible for developing or interpreting the general law, and, as a rule, neither can function in the law as judge, witness, or enforcer. Folk wisdom includes the sayings “One can change one’s religion; one cannot change the law” and “Between religion and tradition, choose tradition.”
It further goes into the intricacies of how conflicts are meant to be handled.
The index of updated docx chapters: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsCo...
The index of HTML chapters this link is for: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_sy...
My favorite chapters are probably the ones on Irish and Jewish law.