Book Review: Legal Systems Very Different From Ours

Claude

Summary. This is Scott Alexander's review of David Friedman's Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, which surveys how societies without strong centralized states or public prosecutors have historically provided law and order. Case studies include Gypsy kris courts enforced through pollution taboos, Amish congregations acting as a 'competitive dictatorship' of exit rights, 18th century England's system of privately-financed prosecution and bribe-based sentence commuting, and medieval Iceland's transferable right to prosecute and outlawry as ultimate sanction. The review dwells on the 'outlaw cascade' problem (whether such systems can spiral into mass lawlessness) and ties Friedman's account of state legitimacy as a Schelling point to broader discussions of cultural evolution and James Scott's Seeing Like a State.

Related

• government legitimacy as a Schelling point rather than an inherent fact ↔ the principle that in bureaucratic magic, form is the content (Bureaucracy is a world of magic) · Both pieces argue that a system's authority rests on collectively-believed symbolism (uniforms and buildings, or the right stamp and signature) rather than any functional substance underneath — legitimacy is a shared performance, not a property.
• the outlaw cascade problem in decentralized enforcement ↔ the necessity of a bureaucratic override authority even in trustless systems (Bureaucracy is a world of magic) · Iceland's outlaw-cascade risk is what happens precisely because no override authority exists to arbitrate escalating private enforcement; the bureaucracy piece's claim that even trustless systems need an override authority explains why purely private/polycentric law is structurally fragile at scale.
• state-run legal systems as a historical oddity rather than a natural default ↔ industrial civilization as an unrecognized Chesterton's Fence (Industrial literacy) · Both pieces reframe an invisible, taken-for-granted backdrop — the centralized state, industrial civilization — as a contingent, non-obvious achievement whose absence would be far stranger than its presence.