I hope you didn’t miss me too much while the channel was on pause for a while — I have been very busy.

More than a year ago, as part of his Liberty Education Project, Vladimir Zolotorev began posting a translation of David Friedman’s 2019 book Legal Systems Very Different from Our Own — an extremely detailed answer to the question of how courts could operate not only under ancap, but in any conceivable conditions. For my part, I posted the original and published the translated chapters on my page. In November 2020, however, the translation stalled after the publication of four chapters.

And recently, Dima Kovalenko, who translated those four chapters, contacted me and suggested that I continue the work in his place. I gladly agreed. To get started, I took a relatively short chapter on the legal system of my favorite Athens during the time of classical democracy, and now I am happy to present to you the translation of this chapter. I have also formatted all five chapters into an epub and posted it on my page as well. Footnotes for the four old chapters are currently missing — apparently, they were not translated. I will add them in time. Please test whether the book reads normally for you — I tried formatting it in the newer epub3 format, but if it turns out that it is not sufficiently supported by your e-readers, then there is no point in overcomplicating things and it would be better to return to epub2; the book does not contain complex layout for which the new format would be absolutely necessary.

I would also be glad if someone would take on creating a cover for the book — for now, I am using the original English one, but the final edition will clearly require something else.