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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
by A_D_E_P_T 15d 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.
- mannykannot 15d 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 15d 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 15d 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.
- applfanboysbgon 15d agoSorry, 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?
- LarsAlereon 15d agoObviously 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-than-you 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.
- alex43578 15d agoFor 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.
- cucumber3732842 15d 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...
- thayne 15d agoIDK, 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.
- cmrx64 15d agowhat 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.
- dwedge 15d 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
- cmrx64 14d agoand once again I question: what decline of superstition? expert- commission-worship and committee-worship, its own form of superstition, supplanted older forms of irrationalism but with no increase in actual purchase on reality. mesmerism, psychical, criminological, and race anthropological forensic “science” has been participating in the same fads of epistemology as the rest of it. you read a report by the library of congress and you read what lawmakers do in response and the eventual judicial impact, and you have a hard time locating that decline, unless you are also under the superstition of prestige.
- dwedge 14d agoOnce again, you're asking the wrong person
- paxcoder 15d ago[dead]
- smelendez 15d agoI 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.
- 4ndrewl 15d agoI think that's addressed in the article ( the ladder example)
- shakna 15d 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.
- sharpshadow 15d agoGood 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”.
- ButlerianJihad 14d agoI live in the shadow of the Superstition Mountains. That includes the Lost Dutchman. While such monikers may derive from the mid-18th century, in 2026 we must wait for the Sun to rise beyond the visible horizon of the superstitions until our carbon-based bodies, full of mostly water, can perceive its photons and infrared radiation. GK Chesterton eschewed superstition, as the Catholic Church has roundly condemned the same foolish and unfounded beliefs of rank-and-file Catholics. Paul the Apostle thundered against “[Stupid] Galatians! Who has bewitched you? … Are you so foolish?” [Gal 3:1–5] Perhaps the alleged “decline of superstition” during the Enlightenment was, itself, a superstition? A “meta-superstition” that scientism cannot err in its data nor conclusions?
- toast0 14d ago> The interesting question is: Why were trains supposedly fatal to the law of deodands whereas ships were not? I would flip it around and say why is it necessary for ships and not for trains. Train owners are typically easily accessible by the courts in which their trains operate. Ship owners much less so. If a ship owner has a potentially large liability in some jurisdiction, they may arrange to never do business in that jurisdiction again, but a train owner doesn't generally have that option. Especially in older days when the rail owner and the train owner were almost always the same. You can't just pack up your rails and go away when your trains cause a problem.