alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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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.
I wonder how this mentality carried forward into modern asset forfeiture concepts (hey, we don't destroy those cars, we get to sell them and make cha-ching!)
I think the superstitions are still there, but hidden in a more "utilitarian" guise.
Ha, and of course wiki makes a brief note about this: In the United States
"In American law, the deodand has been cited as a source for the modern civil forfeiture doctrine.[6][9]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deodand#In_the_United_States
Thank you for this interesting information.
I also wondered why trains were supposedly fatal to the law of deodands whereas ships were not. My spur-of-the-moment, totally uninformed guess was that, in the case of shipwrecks, the sea (or, more generally, the marine environment) was regarded as the killer. The scenarios that Richard Posner is writing about seem somewhat different, however, at least in that after a shipwreck more serious than a calm-water grounding, there's often nothing much to seize.
I think the author confused the concept of movable property — meaning personal property, as in not real estate — with a requirement that the object be in motion.
Given the shared source of the legal doctrines, I'd like to see the terms "superstition" and "irrational relic" properly applied to human incarceration as well, although the historical context recedes with every new generation.
> decline of superstition from roughly the second half of the 18th century on
I'm sorry, but no. Superstition absolutely did not decline during that period. It did change shape, but it was not declining.
You're talking about a period which saw the resurgence of spiritualism - 1840s to 1920s. Revival of old faiths, creations of new ones. Every single person buzzing with ideas on magic.
>The interesting question is: Why were trains supposedly fatal to the law of deodands whereas ships were not?
Because the state has an interest in trains doing train things unfettered, an interest in not pissing off local business, especially big business.
Some foreigner's ship on the other hand...
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Good point about the older origin from Greek and Hebrew laws. While promoting for antique laws in blog style inspired from this article I came across the 9th century english law “while two men are working together, one of them is unintentionally killed by a tree that the other is felling, the tree itself shall be given to the dead man’s kinsmen”.