A_D_E_P_T10 hours ago
The article belabors the point a little bit. A deodand was any inanimate object directly linked to a human fatality -- from a runaway cart to a falling branch -- and it was usually condemned and destroyed. (Or surrendered to the King and then sold, depending.)
There was often some hair-splitting involved, but the law of deodands was on the books for hundreds of years in England, and it reflects still older Greek and Hebrew laws where inanimate objects that killed people were cast out or destroyed.
The railways did contribute to the end of the custom. But this is not simply because rail equipment was too expensive to seize or condemn. Richard Posner, in The Problems of Jurisprudence, notes:
> [The law of deodands] eventually became dysfunctional but, as Holmes explained, the old law turned out to have a new use. The victim of a maritime accident may encounter great difficulty in trying to obtain legal redress directly against the owner of the ship that did the harm, because the owner may live far away, quite possibly in a foreign jurisdiction. By analogy to the law of deodands, why not treat the ship itself as the wrongdoer, and hence let the victim sue the ship in the first port in which it berths after the accident? Until the suit is resolved, the ship will not be allowed to leave the port unless the ship's owner or master posts a bond. In this way the victim can obtain and collect a judgment without traveling to the owner's domicile. Admiralty law adopted this approach and still follows it.
The interesting question is: Why were trains supposedly fatal to the law of deodands whereas ships were not?
I think that it has much more to do with the decline of superstition from roughly the second half of the 18th century on -- courts began to view the old law as an irrational relic, and it gradually fell out of legal fashion.
sharpshadow21 minutes ago
Good point about the older origin from Greek and Hebrew laws. While promoting for antique laws in blog style inspired from this article I came across the 9th century english law “while two men are working together, one of them is unintentionally killed by a tree that the other is felling, the tree itself shall be given to the dead man’s kinsmen”.
thayne7 hours ago
IDK, it seems reasonable that railway companies, some which had significant wealth and influence, used the decline of superstition as a superficial reason to get rid of laws that were inconvenient to them.
cmrx647 hours ago
what decline of superstition? America in particular was writhing with religious revivals, cults, and new age movements to the present day. religious adherence spiked massively, spiritualism absolutely exploded after their civil war.
dwedge13 minutes ago
> I think that it has much more to do with the decline of superstition from roughly the second half of the 18th century on -- courts began to view the old law as an irrational relic, and it gradually fell out of legal fashion.
From the comment they replied to. You should question this one level higher
wormius10 hours ago
I wonder how this mentality carried forward into modern asset forfeiture concepts (hey, we don't destroy those cars, we get to sell them and make cha-ching!)
I think the superstitions are still there, but hidden in a more "utilitarian" guise.
Ha, and of course wiki makes a brief note about this: In the United States
"In American law, the deodand has been cited as a source for the modern civil forfeiture doctrine.[6][9]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deodand#In_the_United_States
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smelendez4 hours ago
I think the author confused the concept of movable property — meaning personal property, as in not real estate — with a requirement that the object be in motion.
mannykannot10 hours ago
Thank you for this interesting information.
I also wondered why trains were supposedly fatal to the law of deodands whereas ships were not. My spur-of-the-moment, totally uninformed guess was that, in the case of shipwrecks, the sea (or, more generally, the marine environment) was regarded as the killer. The scenarios that Richard Posner is writing about seem somewhat different, however, at least in that after a shipwreck more serious than a calm-water grounding, there's often nothing much to seize.
lmz5 hours ago
Train owners were mostly local versus possibly foreign ships?
ufocia9 hours ago
Haven't read the article, but there are far more accidents at sea than just shipwrecks, which would be probably the most extreme type of accident.
cwmoore9 hours ago
Given the shared source of the legal doctrines, I'd like to see the terms "superstition" and "irrational relic" properly applied to human incarceration as well, although the historical context recedes with every new generation.
applfanboysbgon9 hours ago
Sorry, let me clarify your position? You're saying that prisons are irrational and superstitious and that Anders Breivik should be free? Care to explain your enlightened view to the class, if I'm not misunderstanding you?
LarsAlereon6 hours ago
Obviously nobody thinks once-in-a-generation exceptional monsters should be living among us, building straw men like that isn't helpful. I recommend reading the Scott Alexander blog post "Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know" here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-...
To oversimplify, the only value that prison provably offers to society is the crimes prevented by keeping someone who would have done crimes locked up. Pretty much all of the other supposed benefits like deterrence (not doing a crime due to fear of punishment) or rehabilitation (becoming a better person in prison) don't actually exist in real life at meaningful rates. Because it costs so much to keep someone in prison, it's actually really hard to find cases where the harm to society for the crimes they would have done justifies the investment of resources to imprison them. That doesn't mean no such cases exist and we shouldn't have prisons, but they are clearly overused when they are almost the default method of crime consequence in Western society, especially for minor property crimes like retail shoplifting.
alex435784 hours ago
For most crimes at both the mild and severe ends of the spectrum, the reality is that imprisonment is the only effective way to reduce these crimes. Deterrence and rehabilitation are fiction: criminals are and will continue to be criminals.
What is your proposed method to prevent minor property crimes? A fine? Probation? An educational class on not stealing? When those inevitably fail, you need to remove the person from society to prevent them from continuing to commit the crime and impacting others.
There's certainly a discussion to be had about imprisoning people for victimless crimes, like drug possession by itself (my POV is overdose to your heart's content), but for crimes that result in victims, removal from society to reduce/prevent additional victims is a reasonable course of action.
LarsAlereon3 hours ago
I feel like you're asking two different questions: what do we do about average criminals, and what do we do when our normal strategies don't work?
Most shoplifters stop after they get caught the first time, even if they don't face any further consequences. Most people who keep shoplifting after that stop if they are caught and face consequences like community service. In general, the system of escalating punishments before prison actually works to keep problems from developing to that level.
If someone is doing serious violent crimes then it seems obvious that they need to be imprisoned until we can figure out how to make them stop. But what if someone is doing minor property crimes where the total value of those crimes does not exceed the cost to imprison them? In that case we are essentially offering an incredibly inefficient subsidy to property owners.
The real answer is to directly address the factors that lead to crime and disorder, such as cost of living exceeding prevailing wages, unemployment, drug addiction, and mental illness.
alex43578an hour ago
Most criminals do not stop after they get caught the first time.
I can't find shoplifting-specific statistics, but then again, essentially nobody is being jailed for only shoplifting anyways, so it's a moot point in a conversation about incarceration.
On a broader discussion of the importance of incarceration in reducing continued victimization of society:
"In many states, up to 80 percent of the youth who are incarcerated are rearrested within 3 years of release" - https://csgjusticecenter.org/publications/reducing-juvenile-...
"According to the National Institute of Justice, almost 44 percent of the recently released return before the end of their first year out. About 68 percent of 405,000 prisoners released in 30 states in 2005 were arrested for a new crime within three years of their release from prison, and 77 percent were arrested within five years, and by year nine that number reaches 83 percent.
The solution for your example of minor property crimes is reducing the cost of incarceration, not letting them continue commit property crimes and therefore offload the costs of society's failure to police criminals onto citizens.
To your point of "how do we make them stop", incarceration/forced hospitalization is ironically the answer to some of your supposed "causes" of crime, like mental illness and drug addiction. Look to a place like California or Seattle to see the impact of these approaches, where every imaginable alternative has been tried to control homelessness, drug addiction, and nuisance crime, far exceeding the cost of just locking them up.
NoMoreNicksLeftan hour ago
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shaknaan hour ago
> decline of superstition from roughly the second half of the 18th century on
I'm sorry, but no. Superstition absolutely did not decline during that period. It did change shape, but it was not declining.
You're talking about a period which saw the resurgence of spiritualism - 1840s to 1920s. Revival of old faiths, creations of new ones. Every single person buzzing with ideas on magic.
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cucumber37328427 hours ago
>The interesting question is: Why were trains supposedly fatal to the law of deodands whereas ships were not?
Because the state has an interest in trains doing train things unfettered, an interest in not pissing off local business, especially big business.
Some foreigner's ship on the other hand...
paxcoder6 hours ago
[dead]
zrobotics10 hours ago
This is only tangentially on-topic, but the opening anecdote about the floor collapse immediately reminded me of the Erfurt latrine disaster. If you aren't already familiar, count yourself as one of today's lucky 10k people:
mitxela7 hours ago
Very Dwarf Fortressy, except DF doesn't have latrine pits, so you usually have to drop them in magma instead.
59percentmore8 hours ago
>What would a medieval jury do, tasked to rule on an AI encouraging suicide or murder?
An interesting conundrum. Is the maker of the AI considered to have been practicing magic and summoning a demon? The user? What's the movable chattel object in this case?
buildsjets10 hours ago
Fundament: an archaic or formal term for the buttocks/anus.
Yer welcome.
Joker_vD7 hours ago
Similar etymology to "foundation": both derive ultimately from the same Latin word, "fundo", just from slightly different nominalizations (fundamentum/fundatio). Fittingly enough, that word still means "foundation" in e.g. French, German, and Polish.
bryanrasmussen10 hours ago
fundament is a base of anything, amongst which the buttocks was the fundament of the human anatomy apparently.
mannykannot10 hours ago
A point of view best appreciated from a semi-reclining position.
tzs6 hours ago
Medieval law often just seem weird by modern standards.
Another good example of medieval weirdness is animal trials [1].
usernametaken29an hour ago
Imagine after the suicide scandal OpenAI would have had to pull up with hundreds of thousands of GPUs in front of the Holy See to betroth ChatGPT as a deodand to the church. Fucking hilarious
winter_blue5 hours ago
It's sad that they only changed the law when circumstances meant it would help the rich.
jongjong5 hours ago
The idea of compensating victims proportionally to the value of objects which caused harm is interesting and reveals an interesting mindset.
We are so far removed from this mindset nowadays that it seems illogical. But there is an underlying logic that; the more expensive an object, the more human labor went into building it, the more the owner should pay if it causes harm. There is a notion of "with great power comes great responsibility."
Had we still had these laws, we would look at trains, airplanes and AI very differently and we would never have allowed corporations to exist.
It does seem like there is a deep wisdom in there about the dangers of complex and expensive objects. The creation of complex objects and structures (including abstract ones) is a form of idolatry.