Тег: Judgments

When the forest is cut, chips fly

Why is it that in many ancient narratives, ostracism/exile was mentioned as the only punishment, even for the most terrible criminals—murderers and rapists?

A truly interesting observation, for which even I could not find an answer for a long time. After all, no one was running a campaign for the humanization of punishments back then. Nor were there opportunities for a criminal to threaten significant damage to the entire society in the event of their arrest (the first mention of such a deterrence model was described by John von Neumann as “M.A.D.” after World War II, and even then it was realistic only for large group subjects—states, but not for individual actors).

So, the most plausible version is the extremely high value of human life in the described societies. For if people tried to arrest a criminal who was not initiating violence at that moment, he would likely be able to kill several people who came for him. In those societies, such a risk was considered unacceptable, so people simply motivated the villain to leave the community, ceasing all interaction with him. In mathematical terms, this solution was optimal in the game-theory matrix.

A different matter is strictly hierarchical etatist societies, where the phrase “The death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is statistics” is a norm of life. There, sacrificing even a hundred security officers to arrest one person is a good way to demonstrate the power of the stationary bandit (the state), so that others fear to contradict it. As for the fact that the mothers of the fallen security officers will cry at their graves, that is nothing terrible; “when the forest is cut, chips fly.” You can provide a survivor’s benefit in the amount of two minimum wages, and they will even kiss the portrait of the “radiant leader.”

What conclusion can be drawn from this? If you support physical punishments, including the use of violence for the confiscation of property, and justify this by a “court decision,” then you are not a libertarian! You are a vile authoritarian bastard like Hitler and Pol Pot, for whom “the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is statistics.”

Bitarch

How will courts work under ancap?

анонимный вопрос

Since anarcho-capitalism does not emerge through social engineering, it is obviously pointless to make promises in the vein of “once ancap is established, all courts will operate according to these rules we have set.” We can show how courts operated in historical stateless societies, how they operate now in the non-state sphere, and how they could be organized if the state were consciously outgrown.

The issue of historical non-state legal systems is studied in detail in the book by David Friedman and Peter Leeson Legal systems very different from ours. Someday I will work on its translation, but for now, one can see from the table of contents alone just how many different legal systems existed that did not require state intervention in their operation.

What functions should a legal system perform?

  1. A system of landmarks. With a legal system in place, people can plan their actions, knowing what the procedure should be in the event of a conflict.
  2. Conflict freezing mechanisms. If a conflict occurs, it can always be attempted to be solved by direct force. The presence of a legal system, however, allows for the start of a conflict resolution procedure instead of an immediate fight. For example, summoning the opponent to court, to a duel, or giving them the business card of one’s insurance agent. The faster a lawsuit is initiated, the less damage will be caused, and the cheaper the process will be.
  3. Mechanisms for determining parties in court. A legal system can determine whether a person must defend their interests in court personally, whether they can be replaced by a representative, organize a class action, and so on.
  4. Restrictions on investigative methods. A legal system determines which evidence is considered valid (for example, a blockchain record) and which the court must ignore (for example, testimony given under torture).
  5. Procedure for choosing a judge. A legal system may require that both parties explicitly agree on the figure of the judge (arbitration), or it may prescribe a specific rigid procedure for applying to a pre-known court (for example, at the place where the conflict arose).
  6. Limitation of judicial powers. A judge may have the right to conduct an investigation, or may be required only to consider the evidence provided by the parties. He may have the right to summon witnesses under threat of sanctions, or may be limited to voluntary cooperation.
  7. Limitation of sentencing variability. The more predictable the outcomes of the proceedings, the lower the costs society members bear from uncertainty. Therefore, a legal system usually includes a certain schedule of penalties rather than leaving such things entirely to the discretion of the judge.
  8. Sentence enforcement system. A legal system may assume that both parties deposit funds in advance to secure possible compensation for a claim, may assume that the plaintiff collects the court-awarded amount independently, or may, for example, provide a system of coercion to execute sentences (for ancap, i.e., a society with an even distribution of the balance of violence potential, such coercion can only be non-violent).

Under ancap, various market agents can provide either a full range of legal services or individual specialized services. For example, a detective agency may provide only the search for evidence for court, a collection service only ensure recovery, a law firm represent the client’s interests in court, and the court itself organize the proceedings and issue decisions according to a pre-agreed legal system.

The development of legal systems is an evolutionary process, and it is impossible to predict in advance which solutions will be in demand in the market and which will not. Whether legal systems will be created by individual authoritative lawyers, consortia of legal service providers, or borrowed directly from existing systems is also impossible to predict.

More detailed information on the mechanisms of interaction between different elements of the legal system under ancap can be read in David Friedman’s book The Machinery of Freedom, chapter Police, Courts, and Laws in a Free Market.

On tangled court cases

Let’s imagine the following situation arising in an imaginary ancap society. In my opinion, someone has caused damage to my property, but in the opinion of that someone, he caused me no damage. And the circumstances of this case are such that it is very, very controversial; it is difficult for an objective party to determine who is right. As a result, this leads to a situation where, across a large sample of different courts, half of them side with me, and the other half side with the party I am accusing. To my suggestions to pay at least a portion of the compensation demanded by me (and by the courts that sided with me), the opponent categorically brushes them off, because, in his opinion, he did not cause damage to my property, and therefore does not owe me a single penny.

Under the conditions of a state, such a problem is reliably solved by a hierarchy of courts. Yes, someone will remain dissatisfied, but that is the whole essence of the institution of the court. In the conditions of ancap, however, we arrive at a complex conflict where my bailiffs and my opponent’s security must, in effect, start fighting each other, since both conflicting parties are equally right. What solution does ancap offer for such situations? And how should I personally behave in such a situation?

SK (the question is accompanied by a donation in the amount of 0.00088285btc)

The function of a court is to help the parties resolve their conflict. The only way to do this is for both parties to the conflict to recognize the jurisdiction of a particular court in a specific case. If the case is complex and convoluted, we cannot know in advance the position of any specific pre-designated court until it completes the proceedings. Therefore, all the parties to the conflict need to do is find a court that has a good enough reputation, is acceptable in price, and is willing to take on the case. Then, both parties enter into an agreement with the court that they are ready to execute its verdict in this case, and only after that does the court even begin to delve into the subject.

Since the case is so murky, the final court decision will likely be quite a compromise, such as one party receiving partial satisfaction of their claims while paying some compensation to the other party. But, however, we cannot know this in advance.

Naturally, each party to the conflict will be interested in the impartiality of the court; therefore, they will probably consider it important to include a clause in the contract stating that they reserve the right to withdraw from the process before the end of the proceedings if they can demonstrate the court’s interest in a particular outcome.

If one of the parties refuses in advance to recognize any verdict other than one that completely relieves them of obligations, they are thereby refusing the court as such, which means they intend to continue an open conflict with the second party. In this case, the party that agrees to the court can wave this readiness around, saying, “I am not the one starting a war here, I am merely defending myself,” and thereby gain new allies while gradually stifling the aggressor with sanctions, forcing them into peaceful negotiations.

By the way, peaceful negotiations, without any external arbitrator, are also a way of resolving a conflict, so a court is not a mandatory procedure for this at all.

As has been noted repeatedly by many, the state of affairs in international politics very much resembles ancap

How will accidents be resolved in ancap? For example, while defending myself from a bandit, I accidentally hit my neighbor and killed him with my automatic rifle.

анонимный вопрос

In such murky situations, it always makes sense to start by identifying the circle of interested parties: representatives of the deceased neighbor, representatives of the deceased bandits, surviving gang members, and perhaps other persons whose property was also at risk in this shootout. Then, the picture of what happened is reconstructed, making it clear whether you acted in collusion with the bandits, the extent of each gang member’s involvement, how the neighbor happened to end up in the line of fire, how you happened to hit him, and who ultimately suffered what property damage.

Next, the claims of the various parties in the proceedings against each other are outlined, the court issues verdicts on the validity of these claims, and then bargaining ensues until it is fixed who owes whom and how much. The court essentially becomes the moderator of this complex dispute, which, although it has the deciding vote, is interested in ensuring that, upon the conclusion of the dispute, no mutual claims remain if possible.

It is clear that in most such cases, the person who accidentally shot an innocent bystander will incur significant costs. It is clear that these costs can be partially offset by the attacker’s assets. It is clear that in a situation where the killed neighbor turned out to be of absolutely no interest to anyone, everyone will simply be very upset by such a fuck-up, and the matter may be reduced to ritual sacrifices like “lighting a candle for the repose of the soul every week and paying for commemorative prayers for ten years.” Feeling guilt for a misfortune that one inadvertently caused is normal for a human, and the market will certainly provide ways to make amends, as long as there is an obvious demand for such things.

A strange way for atheists to recover costs, even in the case where the subject to whom they are being paid is already gone.

If court fees are paid by the losing party, wouldn’t it be more profitable for the court to rule against the rich?

And what should be done if the losing party refuses to pay (they don’t have enough assets), doesn’t want to work, or has simply checked out entirely? And, perhaps a silly question, but how can one reliably find out about previous court decisions? It’s not like reading reviews for a pizzeria.

Yura

What should a restaurateur do if a customer orders a lavish lunch, eats, and then, without paying, grabs a fork, stabs themselves in the eye, and dies? Write off the losses. What should a court do that agreed to judge a client who was clearly unable to pay for its services? Write off the losses.

Of course, a court could try to make a decision based not on the correctness of one of the parties in the conflict, but on their solvency. But people go to court voluntarily and choose it from many competing offers on a free market. In the long run, such judicial bias is no longer a profitable strategy. Another thing is that a court is not obliged to take on every case brought to it. For a small claim — find a cheaper court or settle it on your own.

As for reliable information about previous court decisions, both the courts themselves (if they believe they have a right to be proud of them) and their potential clients are interested in its provision. Whether such information will be collected in a registry of some association of courts, or whether a private aggregator providing excerpts to anyone for a modest fee will handle it — I won’t make such a detailed prediction, as there are many quite viable options, and it’s not even a fact that exactly one will eventually dominate the market. It is clear that not all decisions of all courts will end up in such registries, just as buying a bag of sunflower seeds is usually not recorded on a blockchain. After all, a court is simply a service, and in a free market, it can be provided by anyone to anyone, as long as the principle of voluntariness is observed.

Before such a court, it is indeed more dangerous to be rich than to be guilty

On ridiculous lawsuits under ancap

Suppose the owner of a private garden with trees files a lawsuit against one of the neighbors, claiming that the neighbor breathes oxygen produced by the garden’s trees but does not pay for it, and demands payment for this oxygen at a price of 1 ancapodollar per liter. What decision is a court following libertarian principles most likely to make?

анонимный вопрос

Answered by Alex Murin

Most likely, the greedy plaintiff’s reputation will suffer greatly, and the court will fine them for attempting to enrich themselves through the court. The burden of proof lies with the plaintiff. Consequently, the plaintiff would have to prove that the defendant is actually breathing their oxygen. For example, by finding oxygen molecules produced by their plants within the defendant’s body. Not to assume it, but to provide real evidence. Since the service was not ordered and no promise to pay for it was made, the defendant had no malicious intent to obtain the plaintiff’s property in the form of oxygen. The plaintiff did not take proper measures to preserve their property—for example, by installing a dome over their garden. Furthermore, the plaintiff themselves breathes, and they breathe air containing oxygen not only from their own garden. The plaintiff somehow obtained the carbon dioxide needed for photosynthesis. Is the gas they received cheaper than the one they released into the common space?

For every plaintiff who loves to reduce things to absurdity, there is a judge who can take the absurdity even further: force them to enclose their garden with a dome and stop giving their expensive oxygen to the general atmosphere and shamelessly stealing carbon dioxide.

An important point: the share of oxygen in the atmosphere from the owner of a couple of hectares of forest is negligible, and a hermetic dome over a couple of hectares of land is a very expensive pleasure.

Addition from Ancap-chan

An important factor is that a court handling a property dispute between two neighbors is obviously an arbitration court. Its task is not the formal consideration of a claim, but the resolution of a conflict. These people still have a vast amount of time to live side by side, and if such ridiculous litigation begins between them, it makes sense to find out what the real grievance is, what the real conflict is—and then, based on this, try to resolve the issue so that conflicts no longer arise.

Ideally, the court’s decision should look, in my view, something like this: 1) carry out a mutual offset of the oxygen supplied by the plaintiff’s garden and the carbon dioxide produced by the defendant’s breathing; 2) oblige the defendant to include the plaintiff among the invited guests when having a barbecue in their backyard to monitor additional carbon dioxide emissions from grilling meat over coals; 3) oblige the plaintiff to compensate the defendant for the additional carbon dioxide emissions from the barbecue with supplies of garden produce.

Breathe deeper, the trees need more raw materials for photosynthesis!

Is incitement to suicide/aiding suicide a crime?

Rachok

In the simplest case, we have a picture like this. A person commits suicide and leaves a note: in my death, I ask you to blame so-and-so, because he behaved toward me in such-and-such a way. This is, in essence, the same as if a person went to the square in front of a tyrant’s palace and committed self-immolation as a protest against his policies. He could have carried out a terrorist attack or an assassination attempt, but he preferred this form of expressing his opinion.

For everyone else, this is a strong argument to investigate exactly what the person the suicide asked to be blamed for their death had done. The relatives and friends of the deceased, of course, will be particularly interested in this. An interesting case could arise with an insurance company. Generally speaking, suicide is not an insurable event. But if the heir of the suicide sues the person named in the suicide note and presents the court with sufficient evidence of violence by the defendant toward the suicide, the court may find the accused truly guilty of unintentional homicide, and in this case, there are grounds to claim insurance. Indeed, is there a great difference between the situations “beat severely, the beaten person died from the blows” and “systematically beat, the beaten person committed suicide”? However, I do not think that under ancap, such complex situations will be codified in advance; most likely, the court will make a decision on the merits in each specific case.

In a situation where there is no explicit accusation from the suicide, it is much harder to prove that driving to suicide took place, but if those who cared about the deceased manage this, the task reduces to the previous one.

As for assisting suicide, I already had a post about a girl who ordered her own murder. Anyone has the right to ask for help in such a delicate matter, but to protect oneself from claims by the deceased’s relatives, measures must be taken to ensure the full legal purity of the contract. It would be most logical if such a service were provided by professionals—for example, doctors performing euthanasia.

As for suicide booths on every corner—that is a hyperbole, of course. It is unlikely that the service would be so in demand.

Can you somehow read chapter 11 of Heinlein’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” about the trial and give an assessment? It seemed to me that this is exactly an example (although not in every respect) of so-called libertarian courts. Thanks!

Ancap-kun

I don’t know if Heinlein read Hayek, but in the book “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” he effectively describes through examples the emergence of spontaneous orders, specifically a court that does not rely on any laws handed down from above or precedents coming from the depths of centuries.

The essence of the procedure is as follows. The parties to the court turn to anyone who is willing to arbitrate between them and whom they would like to see as a judge in their case. There are those who make judicial practice their profession, those who supplement this with other activities, and those who may suddenly find themselves invited to judge.

An interesting feature of the judicial proceedings is that the judge takes an equal amount of money from each party before the start of the hearing, based solely on the size of the claim. The more that is at stake in the conflict, the more the judge risks their reputation, and the more money they charge for it.

If either party wishes, the judge may call in any number of volunteers as jurors. The task of the jurors is to deliver a verdict of “guilty” or “not guilty,” and for their work, they receive a fixed payment set by the judge. To be honest, this tradition seems to me a rudiment from Earth, and in the described society, it looks like a tacked-on addition.

After the case has been examined on its merits, the jurors, if there are any, deliver a verdict, and the judge announces the sentence, stating who owes how much to whom.

The point of the entire ritual is to defuse conflicts and prevent vendettas. Instead of a court, one can agree to a judicial duel, where, again, there will be a referee and possibly seconds.

Of course, I like the described system, especially since it strongly resembles how I myself described the proposed judicial proceedings under ancap. I am asked about courts often—this is already the fifteenth question—but everything can be easily found via the corresponding hashtag.

From Chetvernin, yes, and seemingly from other libertarians, I’ve heard that an oral agreement is also an agreement.

Hmm. Explain how you intend to verify the truth of a contract, that it existed, if there is no explicit evidence of it (no people, no audio or video recordings)? Or how will you prove that they are not forged (for example, an email)?

Oral contract

Nothing about a past event can be said to have actually happened with a hundred percent guarantee, even when it comes to natural phenomena, let alone human activity.

So-called laws of nature are general principles derived from observations based on incomplete induction. Any documents could have been drawn up and signed retroactively, or falsified in some other way. Witness testimonies are systematically mendacious. Banknotes are forged. Even the almighty blockchain cannot fully guarantee that you won’t be cheated with a money transfer to your wallet.

So signatures on a contract, a herd of witnesses, security camera footage, an oath on the constitution, and so on—these are merely additional arguments presented so that the judge believes that yes, some event in the past did take place. After which the judge makes a decision: I, so-and-so, stake my reputation and assert that such-and-such an event occurred, and from this I draw such-and-such conclusions.

And if you have neither a signed contract nor witnesses to the agreement, but it is known that until now you have given no reason to doubt your words, and in this case you behaved as if a contract had been concluded, then there is a considerable probability that the judge will believe your assertion about the fact that an oral contract was concluded, and will rule in your favor.

Yes, I admit that within one state legislative system or another, a judge may be expressly forbidden from considering transactions true if they are not certified in the manner established by the state. But when you ask how we intend to proceed in the absence of reliable evidence, it can be assumed that the question is actually being asked about ancap.

With a free market, there will be cheap courts too, and then will the phrase “to hell with it, it’s cheaper than suing” not work?

Clarifying question regarding the post about vigilantism under ancap

I mentioned an example where a person resorts to vigilantism: relatively small damage was caused to them, the other party refused to compensate immediately, and instead of seeking formal compensation, the person simply causes proportional damage, and the opposing party accepts this, believing it would be cheaper than going to court. You object: that in a free competitive market, it will always be possible to find a reasonably affordable court, meaning the argument that swallowing the offense is cheaper than litigating will prove invalid.

In the case of a restaurant display window that I broke, it is true that the restaurant manager requires minimal effort: one call to the insurance company. Then an insurance agent arrives, records the damage, reviews the camera footage, processes the insurance payout, and then searches for me via the video recording and files a lawsuit, while the restaurant is seemingly no longer involved.

The problem is that while I will, of course, pay the insurance claim without question, I will subsequently create such a stink about the restaurant that they will regret it. These people dared not accept the verdict of my court, meaning they still believe they were right to overcharge and be rude to me; well, that is a very compelling reason to trample their reputation. They have nowhere to run—it is a stationary establishment where visitors go to spend time comfortably, and there are countless ways to ensure the restaurant’s clients experience discomfort. And the restaurant management does not want such problems, so if they can calculate such situations even one step ahead, they would prefer to replace the glass at their own expense without contacting insurance and apply sanctions to the waiter who was rude to me.

That is how my broken windows theory turned out.