One of the things that has struck me, looking at a wide variety of legal systems past and present, is the important role of feud as a form of law enforcement. The logic of feud law is simple: If you wrong me I threaten to hurt you unless you compensate me for the wrong. In order for it to work, it requires some mechanism that makes my threat of hurting you more believable when you actually have wronged me than when you have not, in order to prevent the enforcement mechanism from being used for extortion. To put it differently, you need some mechanism such that right makes might. For a simple example, consider the feud system of the Rominchal gypsies, the largest gypsy population in England.1 If you wrong me, I threaten to beat you up. Both of us know that if you have wronged me, as judged by the norms of our community, my friends will back me and your friends won't back you, making it in your interest to either compensate me or leave town. Feud systems (not the same thing as feudal...
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