Re:Wild Ideas
by kamaal on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @03:25AM
(#6165279)
Private law does/did work for nearly all definitions of 'workable'. Heck it was more scalable than the current system of law. In India private law is/was pretty common even until now.
The only real problem with this kind of a set up is, systems by and large become culture centric. And this leads to medieval mindsets. Stuff like banning couples from having falling in love or having a love marriage, or laws against polygamy, support for child marriage, unfair treatment to widows, honor killings ... stuff like that.
Where does this leave us? Despite all their flaws(basically their own definitions of morality and thereby their own laws based on that) these sort of systems are the easiest and cheapest way of resolving a dispute with a very high rate of acceptable justice. Which continues be the case in many places in India today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram_panchayat , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchayati_raj
The only real problem with this kind of a set up is, systems by and large become culture centric. And this leads to medieval mindsets. Stuff like banning couples from having falling in love or having a love marriage, or laws against polygamy, support for child marriage, unfair treatment to widows, honor killings ... stuff like that.
There are also some extreme cases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khap
Where does this leave us? Despite all their flaws(basically their own definitions of morality and thereby their own laws based on that) these sort of systems are the easiest and cheapest way of resolving a dispute with a very high rate of acceptable justice. Which continues be the case in many places in India today.