What were the earliest laws like?
worldhistory.substack.com
worldhistory.substack.com
1. In your example, the group of buddies all created the rules and consented to them. This is not true for laws which instead invent concepts like the social contract to justify itself.
2. When you break the law, say murder, the ultimate victim is the state. The person you murdered is just evidence in the state's case against you. This is why there are Victims Right's movements. This is not really true with such buddie rules: breaking them may hurt your friends' feelings, but there wont really be an equivalent to it harming the social fabric.
3. Laws imply law enforcement, which implies use of force. Are you and your buddies willing to enforce your rules on each other with lethal force?
A simple definition used by anthropologists is a system of codes enforced by external parties.
1. If 9 of the ten friends consent and one doesn't they can still be forced to follow the rule the nine friends decided on.
2. Although it's a smaller scale, there absolutely is a 'social fabric' that can be harmed in a group of ten friends.
3. I don't think laws necessitate the use of lethal force, but yes, groups of people e.g. in sports or school do sometimes use violence to enforce group decisions on their members.
In some early societies, there was a basic assumption that broadly speaking the head of a household should have the right to manage their affairs as they wished. Laws were there to mediate between households (rather than individuals) and the big benefit they give to justify the loss of freedom is the control and management of blood feuds, which otherwise can be devastatingly destructive.
A law is a rule within a system. A rule, however, may exist outside of a system. Thus all laws are rules, but not all rules are laws.
There is no real difference, though. Just silly semantics.
In ancient Greek, I'm not sure there is one. νόμος covers a lot of ground that English divides into laws, rules, and customs. There are, of course, other terms for each category: νόμοι for laws; κανώνες for rules, both in the sense of laws that straighten crooked behavior and straightedges for drawing straight lines; and καθεστῶτα for institutions or customs; but νόμοι generally does duty for all of them, especially in, say, Herodotus, who means all three with the word.
The victim of murder is the victim of the murder; in ancient Athens, anyone who wanted (ὁ βουλόμενος, an important concept in early democracy) could bring a charge against you, but there was no prosecutor for the state. That's why anyone who wanted could bring the charge. The idea that the state is the victim is a very new phenomenon. There also wasn't much in the way of public law enforcement in Athens, at least not in terms of a standing police force, which doesn't really come around until the eighteenth century.
In the example, assuming they were locked in a bare room, maybe they will come up with some situation specific rule like "that corner is for pissing". I think it's plausible they would enforce that physically. Or at least what I heard about prison makes me think that.
But there are also some immemorial rules/laws that they wouldn't need to come up with it because everyone already knows them, like the ban on unjustified violence, theft and rape. I think 10 normal guys would be willing to physically enforce those rules on each other with lethal force.
> 2. When you break the law, say murder, the ultimate victim is the state. The person you murdered is just evidence in the state's case against you. This is why there are Victims Right's movements. This is not really true with such buddie rules: breaking them may hurt your friends' feelings, but there wont really be an equivalent to it harming the social fabric.
I think that's a bit of a modern perspective. There are still countries that allow private criminal prosecution. And for that matter most of civil law does not directly involve the state I imagine.
Umm... aren't they just representing the victim because the victim is dead? If you steal, it is the victim who brings forward the crime (reporting it). When you perform other crimes, again, the victim may be society itself and society needs to be represented -- not the state.
This wasn't the case until relatively recently (the 1700s or so, depending on where you live), and still isn't case in places that use, say, traditional Islamic law (Iran).
Before modernity, people were considered parts of their family/household, and if someone was raped or murdered, the ultimate victim was the family/household, represented by whoever was its head, paterfamilias etc. And the punishment was often a form of blood money (weregild, qisas), to compensate the familial unit for injury or loss of a person.
Current reader will likely find this appaling, but, for example, rape of a young girl was considered harmful against the future value of the bride, thus the father got a bag of money as a compensation.
The past is truly a different country.
While that's true, that comes from the secularisation of law and the emergence of the concept of the nation distinct from the King. Prior to this, to break the law was to insult the King. This dynamic was at the forefront of the trial of King Charles I, who argued that he could not have committed treason since treason was to act against the King - the King was the nation.
That said, I do take your point that different places in the world have/had different approaches to law. I talk more about Anglosphere-law because that's ultimately what's won out, particularly with the system of the sovereign nation states.
- Buying goods and services from societies that don't observe human rights.
- Factory farming.
- Entire mechanisms in the stock market.
- Layoffs and cost cutting without cutting leadership.
- Pay gaps within an enterprise where it's possible for there to be an order of magnitude difference in pay (executive pay).
- Multi-hour/multi-day/multi-month/multi-year labor work, in general.
- Arms proliferation that's not just nuclear.
- Housing as an investment vehicle.
- No equity given to labor in most industries.
- Genocide would truly be illegal.
- Invasion would truly be illegal.
---
That's the backlog.
But living in a highly legislated society, is not advancing anything for individuals - people will be far less free. Lots of legislation is the wrong direction for those who value quality of life.
One has to wonder whether the 'side effects' of legislation were actually the intended effects, and that the main target the legislation was intended to solve was merely an excuse.
Edited for clarity.
Legislation against polluting, for example, gives you the freedom to swim lakes and rivers and eat their fish without getting poisoned. Or to breathe the air without it destroying your lungs. Regulations can give the freedom to not have financial industries 'fee' you to death. Laws can be to used ensure that you have the freedom to push back against the many other encroachments that powerful companies and corporations will always be grabbing for. In fact its our only defense.
You look at laws as restricting individuals, and while that is sometimes the case, their real power is restricting and holding back the worst behaviors of tech companies, factories, banks, insurance companies, tele-service providers, mega-retail chains, property owners, health service providers and all the other key components that make our society run. If they have free reign to do whatever whenever, they will inevitably consolidate, monopolize, and then use that power to squeeze every last bit of an individual's freedom. Not just because they could set any arbitrary pricing (see drug companies), but also dictate behaviors through TOS. All of this will be for their benefit only, at the expense of your freedom.
We need all of these industries to make everything work, but without laws and regulations, things can pretty dystopian for the freedom of the average individual. The heads of these industries will be doing great though, so there's that.
You don't need legislation to swim or eat fish. In a real way, the legislation sanctions a certain level of poisoning to be acceptable. How much fluoride in water, zinc or metals in food, can we 'fortify' food with iron filings and chalk (calcium).
The problem you seem to miss, is that the legislation is already written in favour of the corporations and government in the first place. It is not about the citizens, it just has to appear that way for people to buy into it.
Corporations already have free reign to act as they like - mobile phones are essentially government id at this point - the governance system is delighted that they have access to your private information. There is no concern with protecting people from the worst corporate actions. Corporations are already monopolies, and this is fine.
The legislation is already corporate and merely pays lip service to citizens/consumers - it's there to to provides cover for corporates, as well as providing other benefits, such as creating huge barriers to entry via licensing, etc.
Society does get more progressive and ethical, but it's only one coat of paint. America had a real fresh coat of paint after the Civil War, Civil Rights, and progressive reform movements of the early 20th century. The things you are mentioning is the in between periods between new coats of paint. We're sort of due for one. And, yes, that coat of paint will start to look yellow and chipped too, where you'll notice all the failed promises.
The UN doesn't make laws, it just brings countries together to talk things through and maybe make treaties together. But in the end its always individual countries making the laws†.
† im skipping over the unsc's power to make binding rulings under international law because i dont think that is the type of law you mean. Groups that are part of the UN like the ICJ and ILC have a role in determining intl law, but they more eludicate it, they dont make it.
- aiui sanctions tend to not be super effective at forcing improvements, so again why?
- as opposed to what?
- sounds silly, details plz?
- this is foolish and would not have the effects that proponents seem to think it would
- this is a demand that some job functions be contracted out, and that companies handling cheap roles be small. Both of which are silly.
- what?
- citizen disarmament hasn't had the best results for the disarmed citizenry
- can't be made illegal, but not limiting housing supply would make it impractical
- it's generally considered bad investment advice to own too much stock in your employer
- it already is
- is already is
Also, for police to function, each person cannot be sovereign over their home, they are under the authority of the state whose police force is allowed to break into their home. Same applies to nations: if there's a global peacekeeping corp, and it's allowed to go wherever with the full support of world governments, no government is sovereign over that corp. This may start out fine, but even then there's a danger of it quickly becoming a case of "who watches the watchers?"
“Who watches the watchmen?”, the ultimate is answer is God. There isn’t much humanity can do if the fear of God is not there, as humans will violate all natural and artificial law. Everything before that point is just our human experience of collective compromise and compassion.
That's basically as illegal as anything possibly could be.
153 countries have signed the genocide convention. This treaty requires countries make domestic laws punishing not just genocide but also inciting it. Even just being the supervisor of someone who commits genocide is a crime if you don't try to stop & punish your subordinate.
Its also considered part of customary intl law, which means that even if a country doesnt sign the agreement, its still binding on them.
In addition to all that it is an international crime, so can be punished by the ICC or other international tribunals.
This isn't just theoretical, people have gone to jail for genocide.
I dont know what more you want here. Its literally the most illegal thing on earth.
That also means, out of all nuclear powers and all permanent members of the UN security council, only France and the UK are in the ICC.
The great thing about the ICC is that if the perpetrator isn't a member they still have juridsiction if the victim country is (talking somewhat informally since the ICC prosecutes people not countries)
If all else fails, the UNSC is allowed to "refer" situations (basically add juridsiction) to the ICC. They can also set up ad-hoc tribunials, like they did for Yugoslavia (which did send Ratko Mladić to jail for genocide). Some countries (e.g. Germany) also practise universal juridsiction for genocide. They have indeed sent people to jail for genocide even though it took place in a foreign country (e.g. Taha al-Jumailly). In fact, the ICC has only ever accused one person (Omar al-bashir) of genocide, and that person hasn't been tried because he is already in jail for other things. All succesful genocide prosecutions have been through other bodies, not the ICC.
My main point though is i think genocide is the most illegal thing in the world. The ICC is part of the reason, but only part. There is of course always challenges enforcing stuff in failed states and war-torn regions, but I would challenge people to come up with something more criminalized than genocide.
> I would challenge people to come up with something more criminalized than genocide.
IDK about "more", but murder and tax evasion seem like they'd be high on the list for a state to continue functioning no matter what is actually written as an explicit law?
In fairness though, 2 of those three are situations where the ICC has juridsiction, which kind of proves the usefulness of ICC even when countries aren't members (The ICC has issued warrants for lesser crimes in both of those situations but stopped short of (publicly) charging anyone with genocide.)
Like idk maybe we find neandrathal records being like "grug ate meat first even though the children are supposed to eat first, so we punched him in the shoulder and said 'bro! Not cool' and now hes good"
The prototype for all social organization is the family, as the family is the origin of all human beings and the context in which human beings are raised. The parents, especially the father, is the prototype for the ruler or lawgiver or king. The family is the primordial society that serves as the basic pattern for everything else. When there is disdorder in the family, there is disorder in society in general.
But contrary to tyrannical legal positivism, which posits that all it takes for a law to be a law is that is is “willed into existence”, the classical legal tradition makes a distinction between lex and ius, and ius itself is divided into the ius gentium and ius naturale. The last, the natural law, is morality, so the remainder of the law is a matter of determination of broad moral principles to concrete circumstances. The “law” in this article is therefore “lex.
Law is like that joke that parents don't want fairness; they want silence. The law wants a cooperative public, and will do (first) the minimum necessary to achieve that ("I'm tough on crime!!!"), and (second) whatever is in its own interest (speed traps, licensing as revenue, etc.).
Only with a cooperative public can the government afford to pursue survival and growth. If bread and circuses are enough, you'll get circuses and bread! If not, maybe public regulation and security theater is needed.
I'm not saying all politics is heartlessly unconcerned with the common good, but that the public's perception of the common good is more important to the law.
We always make laws by looking at the previous set of laws, the society they resulted in, the society we wanna live in, and then adjusting the laws.
Even the firsr laws would have been introduced to a society that was the result of anarchy, which is a type of law, like being bald is a hairstyle
Awe of the artefacts. Sadness that they have been taken from their native lands. Relieve that they are safe.
I hope at some point in the future we can come up with a solution that will enable all humans to appreciate these parts of our shared cultural heritage, without ripping them from their current sanctuaries or forcing the formerly conquered to engage in a pilgrimage to the capitals of their conquerors.
It reminded me of Solon's changes in Athens, to broker some fairness, wipe prior debts and outlaw debtor's prisons, require military service (paid for the lower classes), and of course opening decisions beyond to hereditary aristocrats (land owners) to those with wealth (traders). In both cases, leaders seemed to be responding to stasis borne of economic oppression.
However, ideology is not evidence of justice; both Putin and Xi present themselves as champions of the people against the corrupt bureaucracy (and discipline their governments via discretionary application of high standards).
But the brutality of eye-for-an-eye might obscure the point: Hammurabi seems to be distinct in not associating power with the person, but establishing settled expectations so people could sort out their differences directly (freeing the leader from the no-win situation of judging disputes). That makes it easier for the laws to continue largely the same, regardless of the style of government (much as we in the US and EU still apply English and Roman law).
It's a shame our sampling of ancient governance is limited to stone and clay tablets from the middle east. There's evidence of other societies of a similar sophistication but without the hierarchical dependence on gods and beer.
I appreciate it being shared.
I had no idea about this chap.
The more I think about ancient laws, the more I appreciate the wisdom of the ancients. The law that says “an eye for an eye, and a life for a life” contains a depth of insight that many today overlook. In modern society, it’s often dismissed as outdated, cruel, or inhumane. But personally, I believe that rejecting this principle entirely is a serious—and dangerous—mistake.
"Eye for an eye, life for a life" was never meant to destroy or harm, but to protect. This becomes clear when we examine it closely. If justice is reduced merely to financial compensation, then the wealthy can harm the poor and simply pay their way out. Is that truly justice? And what if someone takes a life—yet remains alive in prison, or even walks free years later? How is that fair to the victims? Just imagine yourself as the victim—your eye deliberately and seriously injured, or your life shattered by someone’s malice. Isn't the answer more obvious then?
This principle has never brought chaos to humanity. It’s often misunderstood as promoting endless cycles of revenge, but that interpretation misses the point. In fact, the principle becomes clearer through the lens of individual responsibility. As the Bible puts it: “The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.” In a just system built on individual accountability, those who seek justice are still free to forgive. If those in conflicts choose not to, and let endless hatred consume them, they both suffer. In this way, the principle actually has a natural tendency to limit conflict and promote resolution over time.
In The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, this dynamic is explained scientifically: when bad actions are punished and good actions rewarded, cooperation thrives. (His findings, such as the “tit-for-tat” strategy starting with kindness fosters cooperation.) Human civilizations is possible with very truth. It may not always be written into law—but it lives through free will and moral instinct.
Let those who dare to do evil face the consequences of their actions. Let their wrongdoing diminish their standing—their fitness, as some might say. Only those who intend to do evil fear the law “an eye for an eye, a life for a life.” For good people, it means the opposite: that kindness begets kindness to make all great again.
Yet today, many focus only on blind forgiveness. In my view, this is misguided—especially when it leads to abolishing the death penalty. The dead cannot forgive. They are already gone. If we truly believe that all lives matter—worldwide—then this principle deserves far more respect and appreciation than it receives today.
On the other hand, when someone has caused an irreparable damage, by causing death or permanent invalidity, or by destroying something that cannot be recreated, e.g. an ancient historical artifact, or an entire animal species, then being punished in a limited way, e.g. with a fine or some time in prison, does not seem equivalent with the punished deed.
I believe that punishment by prison is extremely stupid and inefficient. In many places prisons are more like criminal academies than something that may educate the inmates to no longer do what they have been punished for. No wonder that in the ancient societies this kind of punishment was unknown.
In many ancient societies the main method of punishment was a fine, but in order to be a true deterrent the value of the fine was always a multiple of the damage that had been caused. In more lenient societies a thief or someone who had caused property or body damage would have payed a sum equivalent with the double of the damage value, but in more severe societies the fine was quadruple and in some societies the fines were even ten times greater than the estimated value of the damage.
Such a multiple-valued fine seems a much better punishment than any kind of prison, for any kind of damage that can be repaired.
For the other damages, like death or permanent invalidity, the appropriate punishment would seem to be the obligation to periodically pay some amount for the rest of the life of the punished person, instead of paying a one-time fine.
In the ancient societies, the cases when a punished person was unwilling or unable to pay the fine were solved simply, by converting that person into a slave. Such cases would be more difficult to solve in a modern society, but spending time in a prison cannot be considered as an improvement over slavery.
If harm is caused by accident and without malicious intent, then yes—“life for life” shouldn’t apply. But we should never underestimate the darkness that exists in human nature. No matter how carefully a system is designed, there will always be those who can game it.
That’s why I still believe the spirit of “life for life, eye for eye” should remain a guiding principle—not out of revenge, but out of love and protection.
> Such a multiple-valued fine seems a much better punishment than any kind of prison, for any kind of damage that can be repaired.
I completely agree with this. Wrongdoers typically commit harmful acts for personal gain, and if they’re only required to repay the exact value of what they took, they still come out ahead in the long run. We need systems that ensure the net profit from wrongdoing falls below zero—so that it’s absolutely clear: crime is silly.
I’ve even heard news reports that in California, theft under a certain dollar amount often goes unpunished. The result? The exact opposite of justice. It acts like gravity, pulling people’s free will toward sin and crime.
First, it was a way to stop a potentially endless cycle of retaliatory violence, especially where a central government was weak or nonexistent (Islamic deserts, Corsica, the Vikings, Indian tribes).
Second, the logic behind blood money was in some contexts quite compelling. Look up Ex parte Crow Dog, an American legal case from the 1880s. Even the family of the murder victim was against the perp hanging, because they had nothing to gain from a corpse. They lost a valuable person and its ability to work and protect his relatives, and they wanted this ability compensated. A winter on the Plains is dangerous and it made no sense to weaken the tribe further by killing yet another strong, adult man. It made sense to make him compensate and protect the victim's family.
Big centralized settled states can afford to waste lives, in war or by judicial punishment. Other, pre-state units, cannot.
I don’t think that’s a good idea/practice—mainly because it underestimates the darkness within human free will. Wrongdoers can game such systems and kill without hesitation, which ultimately weakens the tribe even more.
Humans have all kinds of ideas and wills, but in the long run, only the fittest wills survive and prevail. And I believe that "life for life" wasn’t invented to hate and kill, but to love and protect. I hope it triumphs.
"Life for life" is, across the entire history and spectrum of cultures, a minority position, for all sorts of reasons. Including the one that you don't want anyone who kills in cold blood (the executioner) living next to you.
Even societies which had the capital punishment usually tabooized executioners, or forced the job on slaves etc.