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Jurisprudence

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My “Country” Lies Over The Ocean: Seasteading And Polycentric Law, Allen P. Mendenhall Dec 2011

My “Country” Lies Over The Ocean: Seasteading And Polycentric Law, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

This essay considers the implications of the Seasteading Institute upon notions of law and sovereignty and argues that seasteading could make possible the implementation or ordering of polycentric legal systems while providing evidence for the viability of private-property anarchism or anarchocapitalism, at least in their nascent forms. This essay follows in the wake of Edward P. Stringham’s edition Anarchy and the Law and treats seasteading and polycentric law as concrete realities that lend credence to certain anarchist theories. Polycentric law in particular allows for institutional diversity that enables a multiplicity of rules to coexist and even compete in the open …


'Mass Of Madness': Jurisprudence In E.M. Forster's A Passage To India, Allen P. Mendenhall Dec 2010

'Mass Of Madness': Jurisprudence In E.M. Forster's A Passage To India, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Law-and-literature scholars have paid scant attention to E. M. Forster’s oeuvre, which abounds in legal information and which situates itself in a unique jurisprudential context. Of all his novels, A Passage to India (1924) interrogates the law most rigorously, especially as it implicates massive programs of ‘liberal’ imperialism and ‘humanitarian’ intervention, as well as less grand but equally dubious legal apparatuses – jail, bail, discovery, courtrooms – that police and pervert Chandrapore, the fictional Indian city in which the novel is set. The study of law in Anglo-India is particularly telling, if troubling, because India served as ‘a model for …