Somali Law (2013)

The sky is green!

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_code

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.

[1] http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

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.

Almost like what "family" would mean in the Godfather movies.

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.

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.

> 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

1. the coin decides who picks first

2. the coin had a known bias

and so on.

"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"

The jiffo-paying group is a subset of dia-paying group

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.

What are you talking about? Have you ever seen long-form articles from the New Yorker or so?