Just a reminder that police haven’t always been a part of ‘government’, and that ‘law’ has a history of existence independent of ‘government’. During historic times, most of the population of the world has usually been owned and farmed, but most of the people who have ever lived have not lived that way. Also, most of the actual history of the world, as measured by what gets recorded, has not been the history of owned and farmed populations, but rather, the history of free populations, in frontier territories like the US, in city states and ‘free cities’, and of course, among aristocratic or international elites. In America and Europe, the modern state is fairly new. Passports arose during WWI. So did large amounts of the economy passing through federal bureaucracies. I think that one can plausibly argue that in America, proper law Ended at that time and was replaced by ‘the interpretation of the Common Law’ as articulated by Pragmatist philosopher Oliver Wendal Holmes.
Just a reminder that police haven’t always been a part of ‘government’, and that ‘law’ has a history of existence independent of ‘government’. During historic times, most of the population of the world has usually been owned and farmed, but most of the people who have ever lived have not lived that way. Also, most of the actual history of the world, as measured by what gets recorded, has not been the history of owned and farmed populations, but rather, the history of free populations, in frontier territories like the US, in city states and ‘free cities’, and of course, among aristocratic or international elites. In America and Europe, the modern state is fairly new. Passports arose during WWI. So did large amounts of the economy passing through federal bureaucracies. I think that one can plausibly argue that in America, proper law Ended at that time and was replaced by ‘the interpretation of the Common Law’ as articulated by Pragmatist philosopher Oliver Wendal Holmes.