Dr David Friedman is one of the world's most interesting legal thinkers. His work in law and economics is both pedagogical and groundbreaking, and his work in non-orthodox areas of legal philosophy is unique. Friedman has taught a course on legal issues of the 21st century, where he discusses copyright, privacy and other fascinating issues that technology will force us to face in the next few decades. The work is now – hopefully – being assembled and edited for publication, but the interested reader should really download the draft, freely available from Dr Friedman's website.
The current semester, however, finds Dr Friedman teaching a course on legal systems very different from ours. In this course he discusses Cherokee indians, Gipsies and other legal systems (such as the Icelandic which he knows better than perhaps any other American scholar) and the interesting thing, he explains, is that these legal systems often contain irrationalities that reveal the irrationalities of our own system. It should not be forgotten that our system of law is far from rid of it's stranger qualities. In the common law system, for example, it is still possible to forfeit an item that was involved in a crime, even if you had nothing to do with that crime at all: in one horrendous case that Dr Friedman mentions, a woman was deprived of her half of the family car, because the husband had used it to pick up a prostitute. The car – being instrumental to the crime – was seized and proclaimed forfeit.
On the issues facing the information society Dr Friedman has a lot of interesting points to make. When I ask him about David Brins vision of a transparent society, he immediately points out that Brin – in sketching a society in which all citizens are transparent to the state and vice versa – has missed the fundamental fact that the power-relationship between the state and a single citizen is assymetrical. Well, this is true – and Brin lacks a good motivation for this as far as I can see – but it is also true that there is some substance left to Brins argument even after ceding this: Brins is not trying to abolish privacy, he merely assumes that the battle for privacy is lost, and that we had better figure out how to construct rights in a post-privacy society. Brins suggestion, then, is that we create rights of access to data, where all citizens have the right to know everything about everybody else. Again, Dr Friedman points out that what we can actually do with that knowledge varies according to our position in society. The state can, for example, use the data to force citizens to act a certain way, but the citizens lack the means to do the same thing to the state. Again a good point. But still, the question seems to be, I maintain, if this is not already the case today? The state has more power than the citizen, and more access rights to the data collected. Would increasing the citizens access rights not actually be an improvement over today's situation – all other things being equal? Dr Friedman agrees that this may be the case (he is in no way convinced), but says that the only real important issue in privacy is where it will be strongest: in virtual worlds or in the real world. His answer is that it will evidently be stronger in the virtual world, which creates a clear incentive for all the suspicious things – legal and illegal – that people engage in to move to the virtual realm. The issue of privacy now becomes an issue of how to protect ones virtual identity. We thus end up in a situation that closely monitors the one in Vernor Vinges famous novel True Names – where power equals knowing an avatars troe name, since that enables you to coerce him or her by the use of physical force.
Our discussion jumps into the exciting and growing world of virtual worlds, and to the game World of Warcraft. Dr Friedman is an avid player – with three characters – and he is quite enthusiastic about the game from both a personal (all his family members play) and professional point of view. Professionally he notes that social scientists now, finally, have been given the laboratory they so badly need.
By creating a hundred characters and examining how one and the same behaviour is treated, social scientists can now test out basic rules of social science in a virtual laboratory. It is not even necessary to change parameters in the game by contacting the publisher or programmers – it is quite possible to do good social science all on your own by experimenting with different characters in a similiar environment.
And these environments also seem interesting places for the development of legal systems, or rather, systems of norms (that are indeed enforceable in some sense). Future legal sociology might be happening in a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game next to you...