Law without legislators
by Jock Coats
Like nearly everyone else I have lived most of my life not thinking to question that we need a government in order to create and enforce the law, to preserve the peace and to guarantee contracts. Even as I watched, horrified, through a decade of frenzied legislative activity which sapped all my faith in political government it was difficult to see how we could really do without some legislators.
But it turns out that there has long been a school of thought that says we can have justice, peace and security without state legislators and the apparatus of enforcement and punishment over which they wield a monopoly. Not only that, but that there are reasons to believe it would:
- produce better justice;
- provide more responsive protection and efficient, cost effective resolution, both for victims and perpetrators;
- when change is needed, when opinions alter about what is a crime, more swiftly incorporate such change into the law as practiced;
- and adjudicate between and reconcile different systems of law, such as religious law.
All without legislators; without, in a word, a state.
Jock Coats,
Oxford, UK
From his web site:
“IT Support, Oxford Brookes University, where I have also been a Governor of the University and a Warden in a hall of residence.”