I'm wondering how courts would function in a stateless society without coercion.
Let's say someone embezzles money from me, and I want to sue him. Ideally, we (or our respective PDAs) would select a mutually-agreed upon court to act as arbiter. However, what if (1) we cannot agree on such a court or (2) he simply refuses to cooperate with the courts.
Without the threat of force, what incentive does he have to cooperate with the legal system? Perhaps PDAs could have contractual stipulations mandating that a user also subcribe to the judicial arm of that PDA, but what would stop PDAs with no such agreements from arising?
Read The Machinery of Freedom, it's free on the interwebs.
Positronic: I'm wondering how courts would function in a stateless society without coercion. Let's say someone embezzles money from me, and I want to sue him. Ideally, we (or our respective PDAs) would select a mutually-agreed upon court to act as arbiter. However, what if (1) we cannot agree on such a court or (2) he simply refuses to cooperate with the courts.
(1) This is unlikely since there would be a multitude of courts with a reputation for unbias to choose from. The whole selling point of an arbitrator would be "I am unbiased and my clients agree!"
(2) This highlights an oft overlooked aspect of free market arbitration - the failure mode is feuding or interpersonal war. This doesn't mean that society would break down into lawlessness and anarchy since even when handling a dispute through extra-legal means, full liability for one's actions would always be in operation. Consider a dispute between corporate farmer Max and small farmer John. John has run into and killed one of Max's cows with his tractor. Max wants to sue John in court but John refuses to go to court. So, Max decides to take things into his own hands and hires a PDA to enter John's property and forcibly seize damages. Max is not concerned about retribution from John since John is weak and poor, so he hires a particularly aggressive PDA in order to teach John a lesson. However, in the process, Max's PDA blows up corporate farmer Bob's grain silo. While Max has nothing to worry about from John since John is poor and weak, he does have something to worry about from Bob, since Bob can sue and Bob can also afford to hire a powerful PDA. Hence, Max must be circumspect in how he acts, even when taking the law into his own hands.
Of course, we would expect an industry of insurance (Hoppe) and a network of pre-existing, contractual PDA agreements (Friedman) to be in place to make the arbitration process more automatic and also to make the likelihood of falling into the feuding failure mode more unlikely.
At the end of the day, any such agreements must be backed with the implicit threat of force. There's no escaping this. Unfortunately, some with pacifistic leanings seem to think that a free market in law can exist without any threat of force as an ultimate backing. This leads to unending confusion.
Clayton -
How Could A Voluntary Society Function?
Clayton: So, Max decides to take things into his own hands and hires a PDA to enter John's property and forcibly seize damages. Max is not concerned about retribution from John since John is weak and poor, so he hires a particularly aggressive PDA in order to teach John a lesson. However, in the process, Max's PDA blows up corporate farmer Bob's grain silo. While Max has nothing to worry about from John since John is poor and weak, he does have something to worry about from Bob, since Bob can sue and Bob can also afford to hire a powerful PDA. Hence, Max must be circumspect in how he acts, even when taking the law into his own hands.
So, Max decides to take things into his own hands and hires a PDA to enter John's property and forcibly seize damages. Max is not concerned about retribution from John since John is weak and poor, so he hires a particularly aggressive PDA in order to teach John a lesson. However, in the process, Max's PDA blows up corporate farmer Bob's grain silo. While Max has nothing to worry about from John since John is poor and weak, he does have something to worry about from Bob, since Bob can sue and Bob can also afford to hire a powerful PDA. Hence, Max must be circumspect in how he acts, even when taking the law into his own hands.
I read somewhere that even for someone like John who is poor and weak, he can still get paid by selling the claim to his lawsuit to the highest bidder. The stronger John's case is, the more people will be willing to bid because they will be confident that they can pay for his claim and still make a profit off of winning the case.
Read this. (and of course the linked article there). Your direct question is directly answered.
Yes, I would imagine that an after-market in torts could emerge, like you had in medieval Iceland, which would make committing offenses even against the weak and helpless a bad idea since someone else who specializes in collecting on such torts can buy the tort from the original victim for less than the full expected damages and then take on the expense of prosecuting.