Legal Systems Very Different From Ours

Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square—we will congregate in the seating area next to the Valu-Mart with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches at 7pm for 15 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment’s amenity room. If you’ve been around a few times, feel free to meet up at my apartment front door for 7:30 instead. (There is free city parking at Bridgeport and Regina, 22 Bridgeport Rd E.)

Readings

David Freidman is a regular around these parts, and his 2019 book, Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, is a fascinating one. Many of the chapters in the book are fairly standalone and describe, well, legal systems that are very different from ours.

Specific Legal Systems—Call Dibs

We’ll experiment with having people call dibs on specific chapters to read, and then pooling together all of our findings at the meetup.

Call dibs on this google sheet. The password is the same as the one to get to the Discord.

Ways to access the book will be posted in the Discord.

Supplemental—Additional Discussion Chapters

In addition to the chapters laying out specific legal systems, there are chapters of more general discssion in the book. Feel free to read as many of the following chapters as you are interested in:

  • Chapter 21. Ideas We Can Use

  • Chapters 17-20. Common problems when making law.

  • Chapter 6. Discussion on religious law

  • Chapter 9. Embedded and Polylegal Systems

  • Chapter 14. Feud Law

Discussion

In the first half of the meetup, we’ll have everyone to briefly summarize the legal system they read about, and Have Discourse about each specific legal system:

  1. How would you rate this legal system on a scale of 1 to 10?

  2. What does it handle well? What does it handle badly?

  3. What sort of behaviours does it incentivize and disincentivize?

After that we’ll transition to more general discussion, around:

  1. Which legal systems we read about do we like best? Which ones seem straight up awful?

  2. Which aspects of the legal systems we read about do we think should be adapted wholesale into our current system, if any?

  3. Based on 1 and 2, what values does it seem like KWR folks prioritize for legal systems?

  4. Anything else that seems interesting.

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