Hacker News Reader

IDK, 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.

View on HN

what 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.

> 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

and 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.

Once again, you're asking the wrong person

Reply on news.ycombinator.com