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0 pointsRetric13y ago0 comments

That's not true, the Code of Hammurabi had 282 laws which really was it. Now most people could not read but the average person had a much better understanding of what to avoid doing. The issue is the separation between well understood laws with fuzzy edge cases and laws that people simply don't know about.

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6 comments · 2 top-level

rayiner13y ago· 4 in thread

I wouldn't call ancient Babylon a "seriously complex" society. Pre-industrial societies have limited complexity. When everyone is mostly a self-sufficient farmer on his own land minding his own business, the need for law is dramatically lessened than industrial societies where all the necessities of sustaining one life may be the product of the labor of thousands of different people all interacting with each other.

Also: Babylon was essentially a dictatorship. You don't need law when one person is empowered to call all the shots.

RetricOP13y ago

Babylon had large city's and a range of industry's. We are not talking about self sufficient farmers but weavers, blacksmiths, potters, architects, construction workers, priests, teachers, warriors, etc. They dealt with complex issues like what happens when you build someone a house and it falls down killing the son of the person that bought the house.

phillmv13y ago

Our society is also, easily, 100x more complex than ancient Babylon. Not least of which because it also has, what, 1000x times more people?

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brownbat13y ago

> I wouldn't call ancient Babylon...

You may be right, but this does sound a bit like "no true scotsman" territory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Really, though, if we all backed up a bit, I think many of us would agree with some of both sides in this discussion, like throwaway's general point that efforts to simplify legal codes could be very valuable, even if we probably don't want to rigidly subscribe to the "someone should be able to easily learn all laws" test.

jacquesm13y ago

> You don't need law when one person is empowered to call all the shots.

Even the most abject dictatorships have courts and laws simply because one man has limited time.

Fargren13y ago

The Code of Hammurabi was not the corpus of babylonian law, it was a record of some case law.

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