Did those barbarians actually get it right?

[Rodion Romanovich]

Not to mention we are pack hunters, not herd animals. The way we resolve conflict is a proof of this. If you want an animal-kingdom example just look at our brave Otters currently engaged in warfare and genocide against the invading Mink.

So are you saying that a hunter pack would benefit from having pack members who would be hurting their own pack mates?

I would also like to see any serious research talking about a "genocide" of minks. And otters killing minks isn't comparable to humans killing humans, but to humans killing lions or cows. I fail to see what's so sensational...

Germanic law-codes were neither bad nor Draconian (Draconian actually means all crimes are punished by death, or near enough) they certainly wer harsh but the key thing you have to grasp is that those people did not value all life equally.

Did I ever say anything different? I said that Germanic law-codes worked well in the society form they had. When they applied many of the roman ideas, and also some new ideas that they came up with on their own, the society form changed in a way that demanded a change of life style, and increase popularity of the concept of law. Being a historian, you're no doubt aware that blood feud came to be replaced by laws during the Dark age and Middle ages, with comparatively advanced systems existing over Europe by the end of the 17th century, even in smaller villages.

Today most people would say that intrinsically the life of a murderer is worth the same as his victim.

"A person being worth something" is a concept I've always thought sounded ridiculous. Worth, as in money? What is usually meant, I understand, is that "a person having the same right to live as anyone else", if a competition situation would occur where the survival of someone would conflict with the survival of another. Starting with the hypothesis that all persons have the same right to live, and applying consequence ethics, it becomes clear that if we let the murderer survive he will kill someone else, which is a worse end result than if we let the murderer die, and someone else survive. Thus, IMO, the murderer has less priority to survive in such a situation.

Germanic society didn't collapse, so the law-codes must have worked. By contrast our own society is rather worse off in terms of crime than it was 50 years ago. Our law-codes no longer seem to be able to deliver retribution or detterent.

I agree that our modern societies have problems - it has often overinterpreted the concepts that was the groundwork of law in the 1950ies to 1990ies or so, and the whole tolerance and understanding part has partly collapsed because criminals have learnt how to abuse the system by having their lawyers trying to prove they were mad when they committed the crime. I don't believe harsher punishment would solve the problem though. A more clear definition of insanity and more professional judgement of that, among other things, would solve many of the problems. To be honest, from what I can tell reading newspapers, there have been plenty of cases recently where people who believed they could trick the system by playing mad didn't get any lowered sentence, showing that perhaps the system has already gone far in solving that particular problem.

As an interesting aside, the Saxon law on manslaughter required the convicted to support the family of the man he killed.

Yes, that's something I really miss in modern law - the criminal being forced to compensate for his crime as good as he can. For example a thief getting to work until he can buy the things back, etc. etc. That is one of the major faults of modern law. But while that part of the old law is very good and still applicable today, the bloodfeud part of it IMO isn't.