I've always felt that this is the kind of service that a government should offer. It seems a little silly to have to pay a private entity for this kind of service and also a bit unreasonable that a private entity like Docusign is so enmeshed with the legal system.

The government can barely keep a port open or bomb a proper target, and we want to give them control over what is true and what isn't?

Would you advocate for the privatization of the entire justice system?

That depends-- have you ever had something stolen from you, which you then reported to police, after which nothing happened?

Sure, but that isn't the question.

Do you prefer mandatory arbitration to being able to use the public court system? That's a privatized justice system.

Considering that most cases of theft don't end up in public courts? Yes I'd be happy to go to mandatory arbitration.

Mandatory arbitration is only mandatory by way of the public court system.

Mandatory arbitration is mandatory in the sense that it takes the normal justice system away, if as the parent posits the normal justice system does not exist then everything becomes "Mandatory arbitration", right?

> Mandatory arbitration is mandatory in the sense that it takes the normal justice system away

No, it is mandatory in the sense that parties will be obliged by the normal justice system to submit to the specified process and will be held bound by the results by the normal justice system (with narrow exceptions.)

> if as the parent posits the normal justice system does not exist then everything becomes "Mandatory arbitration", right?

No, if the normal justice system does not exist, there is nothing holding anyone to a particular pre-specified arbitration process or enforcing the results of that process.

No, I haven't personally but I'm assuming that you have. If that is the case did you end up hiring a private detective and security force to remediate your circumstance?

I did not, but only because in my case the monetary damage was not sufficient to pursue it. I would have liked to have seen those responsible be prosecuted for it, though.

If the monetary damage was high enough vis-a-vis the ability of the public system to deliver me restitution for my losses, I'd very quickly be hiring private detectives yes.

How do you imagine the outcome would have been different in a hypothetical world with an entirely privatized justice system?

I was in this situation, I lost roughly 2k£. I tried to go to court for 8k£ in small claims which is what the law allowed for as a compensation for the crime.

This guy got arrested by the police, he was released and then run away to Dubai where he's from. He came back after a month and opened a company under a false name and started doing the same scam. I knew his address, I reported everything to the police and the police dropped the case without doing anything.

I'm already paying 25+k£ in taxes every year. If I didn't have to spend that and there would be no police or laws, private companies (aka burly guys with guns) would be needed to ensure citizens safety, in exchange for a fee. Different private companies would need to interact with each other to settle down cases, eventually agreeing on a set of laws to compensate people subjected to crimes.

In this hypothetical world, I would have been happy to pay for my protection agency to go and fetch this individual and bring him to a private court where my protection agency and his protection agency could debate whether the crime happened or not.

It was a blatant crime so there was no reason I would lose and that guy should have been forced to return my money (according to laws agreed on by contracts between our private protection agencies) or work in jail until I'm repaid.

How does this hypothetical world not end up with people that can afford to hire the more powerful protection agency be favored in those settlements?

Not that I'm happy with the current system, but I can't really see how a privatized one would not end up with an even bigger class divide where the laws are only enforced against people that are on the same level as you or below.

Because private court systems would have a reputation as well. You can also have 3rd party companies auditing and reviewing the system. If a court system is notably unfair, it will lose business.

I don't see why corrupting a private judge would be easier than corrupting a public one.

The private one at least could default if they had no more business due to their unfairness.

You realize you have been treated the same as somebody that 2k was all his belongings and now walked without cash to the private security firm :))))

For what history says about such firms, look up Pinkerton agents and London's policing before the current system.

The difference is that I'm paying quite a bit for the government.

An equivalent would be paying the expensive private security firm subscriptions for 10 years and then expecting service when something bad happens.

In this hypothetical world you’d be paying way more in protection money than you are currently paying in taxes to the local mafia gang who would have long murdered all the other private protection agencies.

The local mafia gang would be just one of the private protection agencies with armed forces.

There is definitely a competition between them; but is violence or negotiation the most business effective way of dealing with it?

Warfare is expensive, you risk men lives and weapons aren't cheap.

If there is violence on the street or if protection money is too high, no-one would want to live there and there would be less people to sustain your army.

I think the incentives are aligned to solve disputes in a pacific way.

The UK used to have private prosecution. If you're interested in this topic, there's a chapter on it in the book Legal Systems Very Different From Our Own.

At least where I live, private arbitration is well appreciated: much faster, cheaper and reliable than the judicial system. So, yes, here I'd advocate most of the judicial system to be privatized.

Where I live (USA), private arbitration is definitely preferred by many corporations who require it, and despised by the people who are forced into it.

See for example, "The Problem of Sexual Harassment and Forced Arbitration": https://www.correiaputh.com/news/problem-sexual-harassment-f...

It's not an issue with private arbitration per se, it's an issue of being practically forced into it under unreasonable terms with no alternative options.

The fact that you can't do that with the public courts but you can with private arbitration makes it an issue with private arbitration.

Parties with fewer resources are at a huge disadvantage in either system, but there are degrees of disadvantage. It is misleading to examine the outcome of arbitration once the rules are "agreed" to without taking into account that the process of setting the rules strongly influences said outcome.

If private arbitration is not forced upon you, then there is no problem. Thus, it's not a private arbitration issue, it's forced and unappealable private arbitration issue, which is a different matter (not the thing itself but how this thing is applied)

> Would you advocate for the privatization of the entire justice system?

What if that meant that people could fire their police department and replace it with a different one if they didn't like the way it operated?

IS that in any way feasible or realistic? I don't ever see this even being possible considering the police department is not only going to have more resources, it is in their vested interest to stay in power and are only going to be more aggressive. This seems like a terrible idea

> IS that in any way feasible or realistic?

That would depend on exactly how things were set up, but we do it with politicians who have all the same bad incentives to keep power.

And how would they collectively decide whether to fire the police or not? Maybe via.. voting?

Do you have any examples of societies where this is possible through a privatization mechanism?

Not modern ones, but medieval Iceland worked: https://mises.org/library/medieval-iceland-and-absence-gover...

David Friedman's Legal Systems Very Different From Our Own has a chapter on the Icelandic legal system.

It's a resounding yes from me.

Even law making and law enforcing please.

Governments are incompetent by definition and hold too much power. I'd rather have a N local corporations competing against each other and not being able to extract money from everyone's profit - compared to a massive monopoly governing and profiting off millions of people.

Judge dredd would be proud!

The government already has that control for one of the most important bits of 'truth', its called a land registry.

Which itself is underpinned by a complex web of private title insurance companies and real estate lawyers who have to waste time and money attempting to convince a judge of what reality really is.

At its core it seems like identity services are something that the government should be the source of truth for. They're already being used for that in one way or another whether it's checking a driver's license or SSN, but those are misused in terrible terrible ways by private companies. I should not be in a position of having to treat what was originally a mundane identification number as some extremely privileged permanent and unchanging password. It would not be technically onerous for the federal government to establish a secure federal identification standard. Giving every US citizen and residents an identification card much like what's already widespread within the DoD for CAC cards (Yes I'm aware the last "C" stands for card). Ditch SSN cards, driver's licenses, and other generic state ID cards and unify with one purpose built identity system instead of a hodge-podge of separate ones between the states and federal government. Ban the use of SSNs for anything after an effective date and require proof that some contract predates this deadline to have anything even tangentially related to SSN admitted in court.

I just wish someone would drag both political parties kicking and screaming into the modern age. Give Republicans their voter ID requirements they claim to want so much and give Democrats mandatory widespread adoption for every citizen homeless or otherwise. Make it mandatory to even pay income tax.

DocuSign does not have that source of authority exclusively. Competitors also have it.

I agree, competitors like HelloSign and Adobe Sign are pretty feature-complete and would have just as much brand recognition, and do have these same audit log features that specifically help with verifying the authenticity of documents in court. If I had to guess on why people might still choose docusign, it'd be because Docusign was the first on the scene and has the brand recognition - people are going to recognize it more often than if you mention a lower-marketshare competitor like "PandaDoc"[0]. Another reason is probably how the cost difference between competitors is such a low amount of admin overhead that it doesn't matter if you save a few thousand a year in costs or not.

0: https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/22/pandadoc-the-e-document-st...