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Comment by bewaretheirs | Hacker News Reader

This is part of his "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" which was originally a college-level course and is also available as a book.

It was subsequently parodied here:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/30/legal-systems-very-dif...

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> https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/30/legal-systems-very-dif...

> Finally the authorities handed down a change to the system: the plaintiff and defendant would agree on two lawyers to conduct the trial. Then the judge would flip a coin, and one of the two would be assigned at random to each party.

This seems very interesting...I wonder what the game theoretic optimal strategy is and how the analysis would change if

1. the coin decides who picks first

2. the coin had a known bias

and so on.

This is a variation on the "splitting cake" - one child cuts the cake, the other has first pick.

Here is how I'd game the system: I'd sue somebody (like a neighbor) for violating my rights in some way. Then I'd bring a really bad lawyer to court, and take a 50/50 chance on giving that lawyer to my opponent.

If I end up with the bad lawyer, I lose the case, and move onto my next victim.

If lawyers have different levels of skill with respect to defence and prosecution, picking a strong defence lawyer with weak ability to prosecute is a pretty sound bet

If I get my lawyer, I get a great defence lawyer to get me off all charges. If the other side get my lawyer, a great defence lawyer is doing a pretty inept job of trying to prosecute me.

I enjoyed that parody, but it kind of misses the most parody-able bit of all of the libertarian polycentric law research project; the general assumption that these systems are superior for not involving a state (not explicit here, but certainly true of David Friedman and Van Notten in general)

"Examples throughout history prove the state is not only inherently evil, but also unnecessary to provide satisfactory legal resolutions. For example, in U̵t̵o̵p̵i̵a̵ Somaliland satisfactory resolutions are ensured by independent judges free to make up their own legal principles, murder is deterred by having suspected murderers' family members executed (if they're too poor to pay the fine), clans claim the right to extract larger fines for the same offence if committed by outsiders and judgements may either be accepted or enforced by vendetta"

Might be interesting to note that the Somali courts united as a network (officially after 2000 or so) and became a real legal system that could have been the basis for a stable government, until the CIA destroyed the network for excluding its favorite warlords.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Courts_Union

Not really, since the sharia-based Islamic Court Union that briefly established control over the Mogadishu region in 2006 in between the "Transitional Federal Government" periods was separate both conceptually and geographically from somewhat-secular Somali clan law in Somaliland/Puntland that Van Notten wrote about.

(And much as there's a certain school of thought that's determined to make literally everything about the USA, I suspect the 30,000 Ethopian troops invading in support of the TFG had more impact on the ICU's collapse - and subsequent assimiliation into the new government - than anything the CIA or Bush government did)

For the record, Ethiopia's 2006 invasion of Somalia was US-backed. The US even participated in the conflict with airstrikes.

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