If there were only one man in the world, he would
have a lot of problems, but none of them would be legal ones. Add a
second inhabitant, and we have the possibility of conflict. Both of
us try to pick the same apple from the same branch. I track the deer
I wounded only to find that you have killed it, butchered it, and are
in the process of cooking and eating it. The obvious solution is violence. It is not a very
good solution; if we employ it, our little world may shrink back down
to one person, or perhaps none. A better solution, one that all known
human societies have found, is a system of legal rules explicit or
implicit, some reasonably peaceful way of determining, when desires
conflict, who gets to do what and what happens if he
doesn't. The legal rules that we are most familiar with are
laws created by legislatures and enforced by courts and police. But
even in our society, much of the law is the creation not of
legislatures but of judges, embedded in past precedents that
determine how future cases will be decided; much enforcement of law
is by private parties such as tort victims and their lawyers rather
than by police; and substantial bodies of legal rules take the form,
not of laws, but of private norms, privately enforced.
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