Readings

This week, we're doing a distributed reading of the book Legal Systems Very Different From Ours by the economist David Friedman (and Peter Leeson and David Skarbek), who's a regular in rationalist spaces. The book contains overviews of many different legal systems, in fairly self-contained sections, and the goal of the meetup is for everyone to read one of them.

If you need access to the book, ask on the LessWrong Singapore Telegram channel.

1. Read the Introduction.
2. Call dibs on one of the sections of the book in this Google Sheet, and read that one. You must be able to describe to other people in the meetup the features of the legal system you read about.
3. (Optional) Read Chapters 17-21 of the book, which discuss common problems when making law, and ideas we can use.
4. (Optional) Read this fanfic of the book by Scott Alexander.

Discussion

We'll have everyone summarize the legal system they read about to the group first. For each system, we'll talk about what it handles well, what it handles badly, what kinds of behaviour it incentivizes, and whether there are any features of it we could adopt in our current system.

If there's time we'll also do the same for Scott's legal systems, with a level of seriousness to be determined.

Location

Meet at Holland Village MRT Exit B (above ground part) at 3 pm. We will wait for everyone to gather for 15 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment.

Some snacks will be provided. There are many restaurants and a hawker centre nearby, if you want to buy your own food.