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The Railways Killed a Medieval Law [the Deodand]
- buildsjets 14d agoFundament: an archaic or formal term for the buttocks/anus. Yer welcome.
- bryanrasmussen 14d agofundament is a base of anything, amongst which the buttocks was the fundament of the human anatomy apparently.
- mannykannot 14d agoA point of view best appreciated from a semi-reclining position.
- Joker_vD 14d agoSimilar 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.
- A_D_E_P_T 14d agoThe 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.
- mannykannot 14d agoThank 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.
- wormius 14d agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deodand#In_the_United_States
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- cwmoore 14d agoGiven 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.
- zrobotics 14d agoThis 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt_latrine_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt_latrine_disaster
- 59percentmore 14d 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?
- senkora 13d agoI'd probably consider the individual inference machine (GPU, TPU, etc.) to be the deodand in that case.
- tzs 14d agoMedieval law often just seem weird by modern standards. Another good example of medieval weirdness is animal trials [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_trial
- jongjong 14d agoThe 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.
- winter_blue 14d agoIt's sad that they only changed the law when circumstances meant it would help the rich.
- usernametaken29 14d agoImagine 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
- imaginer8 14d agoRead this as deodorant
- 4ndrewl 14d agoI was really hoping that this would lead into a discussion about Big Tech, but it was just a (interesting) tease.
- WorseIsBetter 14d ago[flagged]
- rasengan0 14d agohelpful in unpacking https://youtu.be/KaaqEikZSd0?si=_Naid96hJxKdeoAZ https://youtu.be/KaaqEikZSd0?si=_Naid96hJxKdeoAZ
- evanjrowley 14d agoThis should be a rune-charged Ash of War for a judge's gavel-type weapon in Elden Ring.