The article belabors the point a little bit. A deodand was any inanimate object directly linked to a human fatality -- from a runaway cart to a falling branch -- and it was usually condemned and destroyed. (Or surrendered to the King and then sold, depending.)
There was often some hair-splitting involved, but the law of deodands was on the books for hundreds of years in England, and it reflects still older Greek and Hebrew laws where inanimate objects that killed people were cast out or destroyed.
The railways did contribute to the end of the custom. But this is not simply because rail equipment was too expensive to seize or condemn. Richard Posner, in The Problems of Jurisprudence, notes:
> [The law of deodands] eventually became dysfunctional but, as Holmes explained, the old law turned out to have a new use. The victim of a maritime accident may encounter great difficulty in trying to obtain legal redress
directly against the owner of the ship that did the harm, because the
owner may live far away, quite possibly in a foreign jurisdiction. By
analogy to the law of deodands, why not treat the ship itself as the
wrongdoer, and hence let the victim sue the ship in the first port in
which it berths after the accident? Until the suit is resolved, the ship will
not be allowed to leave the port unless the ship's owner or master posts
a bond. In this way the victim can obtain and collect a judgment without
traveling to the owner's domicile. Admiralty law adopted this approach
and still follows it.
The interesting question is: Why were trains supposedly fatal to the law of deodands whereas ships were not?
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.
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4ndrewl
I was really hoping that this would lead into a discussion about Big Tech, but it was just a (interesting) tease.
zrobotics
This is only tangentially on-topic, but the opening anecdote about the floor collapse immediately reminded me of the Erfurt latrine disaster. If you aren't already familiar, count yourself as one of today's lucky 10k people:
>What would a medieval jury do, tasked to rule on an AI encouraging suicide or murder?
An interesting conundrum. Is the maker of the AI considered to have been practicing magic and summoning a demon? The user? What's the movable chattel object in this case?
buildsjets
Fundament: an archaic or formal term for the buttocks/anus.
Yer welcome.
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tzs
Medieval law often just seem weird by modern standards.
Another good example of medieval weirdness is animal trials [1].
It's sad that they only changed the law when circumstances meant it would help the rich.
usernametaken29
Imagine after the suicide scandal OpenAI would have had to pull up with hundreds of thousands of GPUs in front of the Holy See to betroth ChatGPT as a deodand to the church. Fucking hilarious
jongjong
The idea of compensating victims proportionally to the value of objects which caused harm is interesting and reveals an interesting mindset.
We are so far removed from this mindset nowadays that it seems illogical. But there is an underlying logic that; the more expensive an object, the more human labor went into building it, the more the owner should pay if it causes harm. There is a notion of "with great power comes great responsibility."
Had we still had these laws, we would look at trains, airplanes and AI very differently and we would never have allowed corporations to exist.
It does seem like there is a deep wisdom in there about the dangers of complex and expensive objects. The creation of complex objects and structures (including abstract ones) is a form of idolatry.
The article belabors the point a little bit. A deodand was any inanimate object directly linked to a human fatality -- from a runaway cart to a falling branch -- and it was usually condemned and destroyed. (Or surrendered to the King and then sold, depending.)
There was often some hair-splitting involved, but the law of deodands was on the books for hundreds of years in England, and it reflects still older Greek and Hebrew laws where inanimate objects that killed people were cast out or destroyed.
The railways did contribute to the end of the custom. But this is not simply because rail equipment was too expensive to seize or condemn. Richard Posner, in The Problems of Jurisprudence, notes:
> [The law of deodands] eventually became dysfunctional but, as Holmes explained, the old law turned out to have a new use. The victim of a maritime accident may encounter great difficulty in trying to obtain legal redress directly against the owner of the ship that did the harm, because the owner may live far away, quite possibly in a foreign jurisdiction. By analogy to the law of deodands, why not treat the ship itself as the wrongdoer, and hence let the victim sue the ship in the first port in which it berths after the accident? Until the suit is resolved, the ship will not be allowed to leave the port unless the ship's owner or master posts a bond. In this way the victim can obtain and collect a judgment without traveling to the owner's domicile. Admiralty law adopted this approach and still follows it.
The interesting question is: Why were trains supposedly fatal to the law of deodands whereas ships were not?
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.
I was really hoping that this would lead into a discussion about Big Tech, but it was just a (interesting) tease.
This is only tangentially on-topic, but the opening anecdote about the floor collapse immediately reminded me of the Erfurt latrine disaster. If you aren't already familiar, count yourself as one of today's lucky 10k people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt_latrine_disaster
>What would a medieval jury do, tasked to rule on an AI encouraging suicide or murder?
An interesting conundrum. Is the maker of the AI considered to have been practicing magic and summoning a demon? The user? What's the movable chattel object in this case?
Fundament: an archaic or formal term for the buttocks/anus.
Yer welcome.
Medieval law often just seem weird by modern standards.
Another good example of medieval weirdness is animal trials [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_trial
It's sad that they only changed the law when circumstances meant it would help the rich.
Imagine after the suicide scandal OpenAI would have had to pull up with hundreds of thousands of GPUs in front of the Holy See to betroth ChatGPT as a deodand to the church. Fucking hilarious
The idea of compensating victims proportionally to the value of objects which caused harm is interesting and reveals an interesting mindset.
We are so far removed from this mindset nowadays that it seems illogical. But there is an underlying logic that; the more expensive an object, the more human labor went into building it, the more the owner should pay if it causes harm. There is a notion of "with great power comes great responsibility."
Had we still had these laws, we would look at trains, airplanes and AI very differently and we would never have allowed corporations to exist.
It does seem like there is a deep wisdom in there about the dangers of complex and expensive objects. The creation of complex objects and structures (including abstract ones) is a form of idolatry.
Read this as deodorant