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.
IDK, it seems reasonable that railway companies, some which had significant wealth and influence, used the decline of superstition as a superficial reason to get rid of laws that were inconvenient to them.
what decline of superstition? America in particular was writhing with religious revivals, cults, and new age movements to the present day. religious adherence spiked massively, spiritualism absolutely exploded after their civil war.
> 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.
From the comment they replied to. You should question this one level higher
and once again I question: what decline of superstition? expert- commission-worship and committee-worship, its own form of superstition, supplanted older forms of irrationalism but with no increase in actual purchase on reality. mesmerism, psychical, criminological, and race anthropological forensic “science” has been participating in the same fads of epistemology as the rest of it. you read a report by the library of congress and you read what lawmakers do in response and the eventual judicial impact, and you have a hard time locating that decline, unless you are also under the superstition of prestige.
A_D_E_P_T · · focus · HN ↗
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.
thayne · · focus · HN ↗
cmrx64 · · focus · HN ↗
dwedge · · focus · HN ↗
From the comment they replied to. You should question this one level higher
cmrx64 · · focus · HN ↗
dwedge · · focus · HN ↗