David D. Friedman

If David Friedman wanted to convert me into anarcho-capitalism with this book he failed at his task.
I'm not only not convinced that it is a viable idea for a functioning society, but I believe in it less as a result of reading this book.
It's not all bad though. The author touches upon some interesting aspects of the an-cap society I haven't read about before.
The book is organized very poorly. The chapter order is very incoherent, different portions of the book feel like separate entities show more not connected to one another, like a random stack of excerpts from different books.
Overall, not impressed. In case you are an anarcho-capitalist and want to share your philosophy with someone, this is not the book to recommend to them. show less

Builds on (morally and empirically) insane premises, but demonstrates some useful analytical tools. Friedman himself notes that it is intended as a 'how to think' rather than a 'what to think' book, and with some reservations I recommend it as such.

Law's Order is unapologetically written from the perspective of a near-strawman economist: hard-nosed, committed to logical rigour above all else, willing to shave off the awkward complications of reality in order to make it theoretically show more tractable, and (arguably) smuggling in some rather extreme moral foundations under the guise of sceptical neutrality. I think you have to be careful with this sort of thing, because even when you know and acknowledge that your conclusions are based on dubious premises and simplified models, it's easy to imbue them with more normative force than they deserve. I feel like Friedman falls into this trap himself: although he acknowledges that wealth maximisation != happiness maximisation, that real people are not actually perfectly rational and fully informed, that there are always relevant facts missing from any simple model, and so on, he sure does seem wedded to the pursuit of (a somewhat naive concepion of) economic efficiency, and to individual freedom (of the right-wing libertarian variety) as a kind of panacea.

My other criticism is that, although it is written in a fairly accessible style, it can be a bit of a slog -- sometimes because the pace or style of the explanation is (for me) a bit off, sometimes just because it's fairly dry stuff. It took me a long time to get through, and I often had to push myself to go back to it.

Still, Friedman is clearly a very smart guy who, despite his ideological biases, cares about the rigorous pursuit and honest communication of truth. So long as you take his caveats literally, and remember to actively apply them throughout, I think this is a really useful and interesting book. show less

I expected another worthy introduction to Libertarianism, but that's not what this is. Friedman does lay out the usual arguments about use of force and individual freedom. He extends from there into two less typical lines of thought. First, he introduced me to the ideas underlying anarchism, and how it means self-organized, mutual decision-making rather than complete chaos. He also provides a very thoughtful grounding in political philosophy, exploring the connections between libertarianism, show more utilitarianism, and pragmatism. He cuts apart any chance at purist libertarianism, using examples that would lead to initiating force against someone as the moral choice. He also introduces some extreme ideas beyond anarchy, the primary example being self-liberation for any child age 9 or older. show less

An amazing book about a variety of legal systems from different places and times, and analysis by a brilliant professor of how they deal with certain universal challenges. Especially interesting when he proposes using some of these elements to solve problems in our current legal system - crimes committed by the government, malicious prosecution, certain crimes and torts which are expensive to prosecute, and patent trolls.

One area he didn’t touch much is the ability to use technology to show more make some of these ideas real — transferable torts would work great with cryptocurrency, and while he mentioned conventional video surveillance (via David Brin) he didn’t mention how structured agreements could include instrumentation and metrics to either self enforce or make judicial enforcement easier. show less