[…] topic of private arbitration has been covered on Reason For Liberty before[1][2], but the question is what sort of incentives does socialization of justice and security provide […]

For me the real issue is - How to reduce ever increasing crime rate ? - Coz rest of the system is just reaping benefits based on its frequency and its occurences ( i.e. crime). I am sure cutting down their incentives won’t help in reducing crime rate. In fact, it cud result in less peoples persuing such careers due to lack of incentives which is again could be ominous sign - as reduction in police force/lawyers means - again huge piling of pending cases and delayed results.

In terms of justifying the state based justice system, one argument used is the efficiency found in centralization of laws, procedures, law enforcement techniques, and so forth, that allows it to scale up and replicate itself throughout the land. It is meant to have standardization and provide a means for drop in replacements of talent from one region to another. While in the classical sense, it is true that having a common system does break down the costs and resources of creating new systems from scratch and the expense of getting incompatible systems to work together, the folly of the system is the same as with any large organization (government, business, or religion) that loses external influence (competition) of the people (customers or citizens). These systems, for “efficiency sake”, end up being designed and modified by fewer and fewer people, and thus become easily influenced to work the system (gaming) for the benefits of the few rather than the original intent of the many. As stated before, this can lead to actual efficiencies to the system, but when it leads to the lack of competition, as in government and our justice system, then the efficiencies get confined to the few who design it at the expense of the system as a whole.

As the author points out, the King’s Men made sure justice was properly administered according to his rules and a fee was paid by all to ensure that it is maintained as such, even though the previous system was already efficient. There was probably a case where the Merchant law gave a severe punishment to a criminal, perhaps a friend of the King’s third cousin, so therefore to make sure it doesn’t happen again, all rules must be unified. By centralizing the system to be controlled by the few, it eventually leads to a broken system of corruption.

But is there a way to capture the efficiencies of having a common justice system, with standardization, scaling, and low starting costs/resources for new regions in modern times, yet still be stateless? With the advent of the Internet, such competition/collaboration based systems can flourish. We have standardizations being created for technology. We have collaborations making the world’s biggest encyclopedia (Wikipedia). We have open source collaboration to expand and improve existing software, removing much of the startup resources of creating code from scratch. Through open source collaboration, the GPL licensing system was created, which is quite analogous to the creation of a law. Admittedly, all these systems have its flaws, but so do all other existing static and statist systems. The difference is that these systems are flourishing and increasing innovation at exponential rates compared to its contemporaries. We will witness over the next decades whether open source (Linux and Google) will triumph over monopolies (Microsoft), and end up making bigger and better profits to the benefit of all.

But to tie this all together, perhaps now is a time to rethink our Justice system to a modern version of what the author was discussing, perhaps through the volunteer creation of an Open Source Common Law and Justice system. Regions can contribute to the resource, and choose to implement by consent the parts their community agree with. Knowledge, experience, success, and failures are shared through the system, and common procedures and standardizations form through nature free market forces, similar to open source software. Common Law would become common once more.

So the question to ask again is, where do we go from here?

There is a lot of statistical evidence supporting that giving extra resources, the speed or allocative efficiency of the public system does not get any better.
This is an outdated example, but there is this 4 county court in West Virginia. In 1976, there was only one judge and about 1,600 cases; by 1979, after the circuit added an extra judge, the cases went up to 2,400. There was no big change in the demographics or economic make-up of the area. What happened was, “speeding it up,” at first through adding and extra judge made more people go because it was more worth their time because of the cost/benefit analysis of time spent in court vs. ignoring it or solving it privately. (Judge Neely, Why Courts Don’t Work) Just as you have to or want to do in any profession, too (and this is especially true of prosecutors), it is important to always be proving your worth and trying to expand your departments budget. How do you do this? By hearing the most cases, and the easiest solved cases that won’t be precedent setting. Because we give our district attorneys and our judge discretion, they will always pick the most obvious and easiest cases, not the ones most important to be solved; and they can send those cases to a plea bargain or higher court. In this way, they further their career. The same way politicians go “I got this law passed for you” when they want to be re-elected, ie, keep their job; so judges and the public prosecutors go “We got this many criminals off the street.” What are the easiest cases to solve? Non-violent, no victim crimes.
With police it is the same thing. If you put more people on the force, then generally they just get more sick days, start putting two officers in cars, more paid leave, etc. I do have data for this but it is really outdated. The unions are too strong, especially in my area. And again, they have an incentive to criminalize more and more people because then they can make more arrests and get bigger budgets and more prestige. I’m not saying cops or judges or prosecutors are bad people, just that these are the incentives handed to them.

And yes, the scope and frequency of the cases does change things. When you have a whole bureaucracy built up, there will always be more criminals because their jobs depend on it. When you have private law where it is just the people in the area, it will cover less ground (violent offenses and property crime) instead of what we have now, which is a myriad of victimless crimes. The incentives would be to get restitution to your neighbor, and punish a criminal so they don’t do it again — not to have a bigger budget from the state with no way of telling whether it is cost effective and actually having an incentive to not be cost effective so you again get a bigger budget.

Your daughter is killed and it takes months to present the case because we have a backlog of petty and/or victimless crimes.
==>Defintely. its irritating. But wht can u do?..some experts suggesting - fast track court system who can serve justice quickly. I am not sure how many of them working as expected as of now. But i guess its more to do with bandwidh of legal infrastructure ( no. of court rooms, juries,lawyers,etc.). If u upgrade that then may be u can see some quick results in serving justice.

Pivate vs Public law
==> I guess the sole reason for effective implementation of “private laws for particular coomunity” lies in its scope of applicability and frequency of cases. Even though I don’t have any statistical data to substantiate my theory. I mean its quite simple - when u talk about civil/govt laws rules and regulations - then they are suppose to cover all “ifs” and “buts” which are generally applicable for wide range of pupulation and NOT like restricting themselves to a particula community .So obviously - the delay part on its execution ( coz here u have to deal with number of cases that too by nor offending human rights and all different sort of legal and natural rights awarded to person), existence of loopholes, prosecution part,etc got to be delayed…I mean u can have quick justice - like they do serve under - various “Religious / shariya rules - especially - talibaan regime in Afganistan - but they are barbaric in nature.) ..
while in China - they seems to have “death penalty” even for corruption

which is a horrible Indian mentality that the solution of a rape is marrying the victim to her rapist
==>Thats the tragic part. But what happens is - After rape if that victim is pregnant after the crime then its very diificult for her to feed and bring-up the child. Not to forget about social stigma coz nobody wants to marry such gal. So the jury wants the culprit to accept her as wife..bit i guess in movie - it wasn’t case of rape it was case - where victim was sexually exploited under false pretext of marriage. So i guess it was not a bad call bu jury.

By the way noce article. Keep writing!