Тег: Murder

If the aggressor kills the property owner, does the property pass to him?

Someone

Property is, as is fashionable to explain nowadays, a bundle of rights. Moreover, an awful lot of these rights can be invented: the more complex the legal relations in society, the more of these rights there are, the harder they are to distinguish, and the more they intertwine. For example, I can visit a friend and sit down to work at a computer that he rents along with the apartment using his parents’ money, where I pay for access to the computer with a kiss. I use a pirated operating system and type the text of an article promised to a client, for which I have received an advance payment. In this regard, can the friend’s parents, the owner of the apartment with the computer, and the employees of the operating system manufacturer also demand a kiss from me, and exactly what share of the kiss? Can I, instead of a kiss, send the guy to my client so that the client can kiss him himself, since he has such an urgency that I have to work anywhere at an odd hour? The answers to these questions seem obvious only if we have some roughly similar notions of what is proper in our minds.

But notions of what is proper depend quite heavily on context. If I kill an opponent in a computer game, and the game implies the possibility of looting the corpse, then the transfer of the deceased’s property to me causes no particular dispute. If the same rules apply in a live-action role-playing game, then my ownership of the killed person’s property can also be quite legal. Finally, if I participate in such an unpleasant variety of role-playing games as a real war, then the appropriation of weapons, ammunition, and various souvenirs from the body of the killed person there also does not cause misunderstanding among those around.

Moreover, military booty may not be limited to things from a corpse. If tomorrow Navalny kills Putin, he could well claim to inherit the presidential post in Russia, and show me that strange person who would dispute this. Prescribe him a triple dose of fantasy.

But as soon as we move into a context where murder is not considered a way of resolving conflict, it ceases to be a legitimate way of acquiring the property of the killed. After that, the entire bundle of rights for the killer will shrink to the factual possession of what he managed to take from the killed, and only for as long as it is not taken away.

Madam President, please choose the dish upon which to place your trophy during the inauguration.

Would the police under ancap investigate the case of a person killed on someone’s private property, for example, in a case where the owner gave the killed person permission to move/be on their territory, and then took them out?

Anonymous question

Let us consider the organization of law and order according to David Friedman — in my opinion, his approach is the most developed and yet remains entirely within the framework of ancap, that is, a society with a free market where everything is traded, including law. Various law enforcement agencies and various courts operate in the market, guided by various legal systems. The task of a law enforcement agency is to protect the private property of its clients and assist in resolving conflicts between clients and other entities. The task of a court is to develop decisions that resolve conflicts between the court’s clients. Finally, a legal system is the product of the work of lawyers, representing a certain set of principles and templates for conflict resolution.

When the owner of a certain territory kills a stranger on it, this may cause a conflict with a wide variety of people or organizations. First, these could be companions of the deceased who are convinced that the execution was unjust. Second, his relatives or friends who were not present during the clash but are interested in finding out what happened. Third, the law enforcement agency of which the deceased was a client. Finally, any concerned individual who dislikes it when people are killed for no reason. In short, the killer has no reason to believe that no one will care about this incident.

In medieval Iceland, in the event of such excesses, the killer had to immediately tell the nearest neighbor what happened, taking him as a witness. It can be assumed that such a norm would also take hold under ancap, since the killer is directly interested in this: by telling everything, he can claim that it was an accidental conflict, or even one provoked by the victim, but if the story is hidden, it is unequivocally an intentional murder, for which much more serious sanctions are due.

Thus, after the murder has been announced, all that remains is to conduct an investigation. Much time has passed since the age of the sagas, technology has advanced, and it is possible to establish with slightly greater certainty how truthful the killer’s story is, even if there are no direct witnesses to the incident. Of course, the killer has no reason to obstruct the investigation, because that would predispose the court against him. But he can, of course, try to forge evidence to create a false impression.

Does the fact that the murder took place on the killer’s territory give any preferences in court? Only if it is established that the deceased violated the rules announced by the owner of the territory and refused to leave the other’s property. Therefore, naturally, the killer is interested in claiming exactly that. Whether he succeeds in creating the necessary appearance is a purely technical question.