GBurch1@aol.com said:
> I love it when bright "amateurs" figure things out from first
> principles and come to the same conclusion that "experts" do. In
> this case, Anders, you'd done something I've seen happen a number of
> times since becoming involved in the transhumanist community: You've
> invented the Anglo-American common law of "products liability" and
> identified one of its key challenges. Here, in two paragraphs,
> you've recapitulated 200 years of the development of this
> jurisprudence and arrived at the frontier of a field that absorbs a
> legion of good minds in economics and law.
A good book on the subject is David Friedman's "Law's Order". The
extropian reading group I'm in just discussed this last week. It's an
economist's presentation of economic ideas behind the common law, giving
good guidelines on how to think through these issues of liability and who
should best bear the responsibility. The book gives good coverage of the
issues of providing the right incentives (and figuring out what incentives
would be right), but may not provide enough depth for people who are not
used to thinking in terms of cause&effect.
Chris
--- Chris Hibbert hibbert@agorics.com http://www.agorics.com 650 941 8224
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