Jo

(a la https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/17/slightly-skew-systems-of-government/)

In the jurisprudence of the American Empire, it was verboten to specify numerically what a "reasonable doubt" is in the area of criminal convictions. The Dominion of Australia thought this was a cowardly way of covering up the injustices of their system, and held a vote to determine how certain you had to be. Article IV of the DoA Constitution thus said that no one may be convicted of an offence unless a judge or jury has decided that if there were one hundred cases with this evidence then no more than one of them would have an innocent defendant. The Constitutional Convention thought that this struck a good balance between minimising harm to innocents while still ensuring that some criminals got convicted. After a decade of this, some activists ran the numbers and cried that, statistically speaking, there were now ten thousand innocent people in prison. Fortunately for the public prosecuting service, however, nobody knew who those innocent people were, and any given convict was 99% likely to not be one of them. 

The Free City of Boston has a much smaller distinction between torts and criminal offences than we do. Literally anyone can prosecute a crime, provided they have a lawyer. (You do have to give the public prosecution service a few months to see if they want to handle it.) They don't get paid to prosecute it, unless they're an actual employed public prosecutor, but they can prosecute if they want to. It's often done by activist groups who think that the DA is shamefully letting some terrible person get away with it. 

(This is actually rather similar to Conquest-through-Renaissance prosecution in England.)

(Update: Turns out this was already suggested by David Friedman!)

The Grand Commonwealth of the American West wanted to avoid tragedies of the commons as regards the landscape which formed its raison d'etre, and so its constitutional convention sent a delegation to the Great Boston Library to read up on Georgism. Eventually, they announced that all land, air, and water were outright by the government, which would contract out use thereof to the most cost-effective private distributors. They immediately ran into the problem of heavily bribed legislators selling destructive use of irreplaceable landscapes to money-grabbing corporations, and over the course of three terms of office enacted a patchwork of overlapping laws that succeeded in more or less protecting most of the really valuable natural resources from permanent damage. Eventually the sovereign polity known as the Nature Conservancy recommended some of their own lawyers from Boston and Europe, and the Commonwealth government hired said lawyers to write a constitutional amendment which barred any permanently deleterious effects to natural resources without a supermajority vote, no loopholes. This finally worked, and the Grand Commonwealth is renowned for its rugged beauty to this day.

After the highly controversial effects that WWIV had on the Levant, many Israelis decided to pack up and move. While Boston was of course a popular choice, and countries all over the world proved to be fertile grounds for the latest diaspora, many Israelis were drawn to the tiny community in India which claimed to be a descendant of the Ten Lost Tribes. The inevitable attempt to codify talmudic law failed, however, for one reason: it transpired that sometime in the past fifty years, the community had decided that since their exile from Israel predated the Mishnaic period, they ought therefore to use only the Mosaic Law as written in the Pentateuch. The resulting explosion of interpretation kept scholars extremely busy for some one hundred years until a basic functioning legal code had been decided; in the intervening period, the community maintained order via a kritocracy which used English Common Law as its base.

The highly impoverished nation of Eastern Cabinda had been granted many printing presses by the Free City of Boston's foreign aid programs, but unfortunately had no other kind of printing press to make currency with; the result was that anyone with a press could perfectly forge money. First the government considered seizing all printing presses in the country via eminent domain, but the Free City had explicitly banned this approach, threatening to withdraw any future foreign aid. International trade regulations precluded hiring a foreign printer. The government then decided to simply buy a special printing press that ordinary presses could not match, but ironically did not have the resources for it. Exportation of fabbers to developing nations was highly regulated, but a charity in Puget Sound without a good lawyer thought they could get around the regulations by donating a fabber which, though it could use any substance as material, was carefully built so as to not be capable of generating anything but six-inch strips of unforgeable paper saying "ONE EASTERN CABINDAN DOLLAR". Eastern Cabinda quickly realised that having a fiat currency was far less valuable than having the ability to convert garbage into paper; within a year, houses were thatched with bills, clothes were sewn from them, and fishing nets were painstakingly woven from them. The Puget Sound charity found itself facing a great deal of public embarrassment, not to mention heavy fines, but it proved to be a great boon for Eastern Cabinda, which had switched to using gold as currency and later adopted the euro.

The Kingdom of England had come under a lot of flak for its department of child protection, which had a track record of needlessly removing children from perfectly fine parents while simultaneously neglecting to remove children from illegally abusive parents. When sued, the department said, "Whoa whoa, man; first you're saying that we're taking too many children away from their parents, and then you say we're taking away not enough? Make up your mind, man! This is, like, a Catch-22! You can't expect us to actually be competent at our jobs. That would be totally unfair. Imagine if you handed a soldier a loaded gun and told him that he has to shoot enemies, but can't shoot anyone who's not an enemy! If he then started refusing to shoot enemies while simultaneously shooting innocents, you wouldn't be mad at him, would you?" The courts agreed that this would indeed be too high a burden on the poor department, and let them off scot-free. (The judges said that the soldier argument was a brilliant comparison, as it was indeed a rich English tradition to let soldiers get away with massacring civilians as long as the victims were of undesired ethnicities.) However, a later election put a very left-wing element into power. The new House of Commons said, "The government will guarantee that children not be in abusive households. Our agency will endeavour to remove children from illegally abusive parents. Wherever and whenever the agency fails in this task, the child in question can (when an adult) apply for compensation in the form of suing the agency in the tort of negligence." This new initiative cost quite a bit of tax funds, but did increase the efficiency of the agency once the agency's pensions were made to come out of the same budget as the reimbursement fund.

Greater Pennsylvania, before its independence, had tended to have matters of law decided by judges and matters of fact decided by juries. However, many issues of statutory interpretation, as well as many suits in tort, depended on what the "reasonable person" would think to be the case, or on the abilities of the "reasonable person". It made no sense, said the Greater Pennsylvanian jurists, for questions of what the "reasonable person" thinks to be a matter for educated elite judges, when we already have the institutional infrastructure to poll twelve ordinary citizens. The Superior Court of Greater Pennsylvania thus ruled that all questions of the "reasonable person" must be decided by juries. There was subsequent controversy over how much precedential value such rulings had (for example, presumably the average person's ability to drive a manual transmission changes over time), but the real difficulty began when the juries started saying, "Sure, I'm a reasonable person, and I've definitely texted while driving before."