My Own Court in My Own Castle

If Christopher Hitchens and Anne Applebaum are both sternly against something, you can be pretty sure it has merit. In this instance, the Archbishop of Canterbury has clumsily advanced the notion that perhaps civil and family law ought to belong to cultural communities. Hitchenbaum rises like a river trout to a well-cast fly: "He wants us in chains! Dhimmitude!" it cries. True, the hows and whens of Rowan Williams not-quite-a-plan-but-a-suggestion remain a little nebulous, but I frankly endorse his ends. Why, after all, shouldn't we join some kind of actually consensual community, say on a contractual basis for periods of limited duration? Hitchens in the highest dander that his five-decade hangover will allow without rupturing an eyeball, screams that a lot of North-London Hasidim arbitrate their own breaches of contract and trust, presumably based on Talmudic principle. Well, why not, if the parties mutually agree to independent arbitrage, why not? Remove the Jew element, which is what Hitchens is really hollering about, and what you have is a perfectly ordinary business practice, the sort of thing that happens every day between parties that wish to arbitrate, mediate, and adjudicate disputes outside of the courts.

To the extent possible, all human relationships ought to be volunatry. Most of us agree on this point in the abstract; it isn't only a libertarian totem. Yet in practice almost no one can abide it, and will argue that it is far more sensical to gather 10, 15, 50, 500 million human beings under a system of uniform "justice," which will be applicable to and desirable for all.


UPDATE: A complementary take on the same.