The return of human uniqueness?

There's been a lot of rhetoric about how human genes are only 2% (give or take a wide margin -- there are many ways to count it) different from chimpanzees. Despite all our fancy culture, biologically we're just another mammal, nothing special, according to this comforting and generous-sounding gem of relativism. Just, however, as in a computer some bits are more significant than others, some genetic differences are far more significant than others. So I've never been much convinced by the "small difference" argument to stop, despite the inevitable frowns at my supposed provincialism, believing that humans are, biologically as well as culturally, rather strange and wonderful as far as animals go.

When you think about it, from several points of view, apes are already a bit strange for mammals, and we are a quite strange kind of ape. Our cerebral cortex is three times as big as a chimp's, but that is hardly the most qualitative difference between ourselves and other apes. We are bipedal -- quite a rarity in mammals. Unlike almost all mammals and any near relative we are naked. We have vocal chords and speak grammatical language full of metaphor. We have something close to monogamy, again rare for mammals, and many of us seem to instinctively collect decorative objects -- AFAIK a habit shared with no other mammals but only a few birds. Then of course there are hands and technology -- with which we've done unprecedented things like strip other mammals of their fur so as to don it ourselves and keep our own otherwise preposterously exposed bodies warm. The facial evidence has always suggested that some rather improbable and important things happened during our evolution that didn't happen with other mammals.

Some genetic evidence for this human uniqueness has just been published. In particular, a very interesting RNA gene called HAR1F that operates during fetal development, and has been remarkably stable among almost all the other land vertebrates for the last 300 million years, has radically changed in the last 5 to 7 million years since our line split off from the chimps'.

The difference between chickens and chimps - which are separated by 310 million years of evolution - is just two mutations out of a total DNA sequence of 118 "letters" of the genetic code. Yet the difference between chimps and humans - separated by 6 million years - is 18 mutations in the same DNA region.

I don't expect this to be the last revelation of improbable and fundamental genetic changes that occurred between chimps and humans.

I'm sure this will suggest to some intelligent intervention. There's already a big group of late night radio fans who think aliens intervened in human evolution, and it's also a good bet that religious "intelligent design" folks will use this finding as fodder. To me, it doesn't matter much how improbable we are, because we wouldn't be thinking about these things in the first place if it hadn't happened. In any case, the small number of chemical changes that these researchers have found in the HAR1F gene are not, just by counting them, improbable. Their improbability can only be deduced from the fact that anything similar occurred so rarely among other land vertebrates. But you can't deduce from that fact that it's so improbable that it's a puzzle why it occurred at all.

The high improbability of our own evolution may actually make the alien-tinkering hypothesis less likely because it makes aliens less likely. If the evolution of intelligence is highly improbable this would substantially lower the factor f(i) in the Drake Equation, helping to explain the Fermi Paradox.

Another point to consider is that evolution often doesn't follow neat statistical distributions. Rather it exhibits leptokurtism, wherein one improbable changes often makes other otherwise improbable changes more likely to occur. Once one improbable change occured, functional synergy and the exploration of uncharted evolutionary territory made the others more likely to follow. The leading candidates for the first improbable change that triggered the others are bipedalism, monogamy, and nakedness, not vocal chords or brain size increase, which are known from the fossils to have occured much later than at least bipedalism. Thus I conclude that the HAR1F changes, most likely implicated in brain development, were probably a late set of changes in human evolution made possible by some earlier improbable genetic changes.

Smart contracts, tying, and product liability

Ed Felten redubs smart contracts, at least for the purposes of tying, "PRM" (Property Rights Management). A traditional example of tying is the razors-and-blades strategy: a company sells you a razor at a loss and recoups the profit on the blades. This marketing strategy is also popular with printers and cartridges. To prevent consumers from buying off-brand cartridges and thereby foiling the marketing strategy, some printer manufacturers have embedded a cryptographic protocol whereby the printer authenticates the cartridge as containing the private key of the manufacturer. Extrapolating from this example, Felton complains about looming restrictions on our use of everyday items if "PRM" becomes a reality. Tyler Cowen rebuts Felten's complaints with respect to tying on economic grounds, pointing out that where manufacturers have an incentive to tie, it generally increases the welfare of consumers as a whole as well as manufacturers.

While I am a proponent of most kinds of smart contracts, I'm also quite sympathetic to the freedom-to-tinker movement. I generally oppose legislation like DMCA that artificially protects insecure smart contracts. And consumers should be empowered to choose their smart contracts wisely. I support open source protocols so that somebody neutral has read the smart fine print. Smart contract protocols, like legal contracts, should be in the public domain.

As a commentor to Felten's post pointed out, manufacturers usually don't have contractual privity with consumers, unless you order direct. Through smart contracts, manufacturers may gain some digital privity with the end user.

At least in the context of the United States legal system, it's fair for manufacturers to restrict how consumers can use their products, since, breaching privity, U.S. courts at least have already decided that manufacturers are strictly liable for unsafe products, often even when the consumers misuse them. Thus manufacturers go to great lengths to make products "idiot proof" and also, alas, "tinker proof." Since Felton wants the freedom to tinker, he should oppose strict product liability. At least, people who tinker and get hurt should not be able to sue the manufactuer.

Finding jammers in a DC network

David Chaum's dining cryptgraphers network is a nifty alternative to his digital mix to untraceably share encrypted information. But it suffers from the problem that since the participants are untraceable, one or more of them can jam the channel, preventing other participants from having their messages received. Bryan Turner has figured out a way to find the jammers if they are less than one-third of the total participants. Presumably this is accomplished without being able to find out much of anything else interesting about a participant. I suggest that a similar technique may also work for a jamming attack in a secure multiparty computation.

Book consciousness

Marshall McLuhan, Elizabeth Eisenstein and others have described the importance of the "printing revolution" to European developments such the Reformation, Renaissance, and science. According to Eisenstein, printing finally foiled the entropy that had destroyed the vast majority of written works since ancient times. Printing also enlarged the bookshelves of scholars all over Europe: by a factor of fifty or more by the middle of the 16th century.

I'd go even farther than Eisenstein. Printing soon brought literacy to vast numbers of people (eventually to the vast majority of us). Printing, especially printing in newly standardized vernaculars, changed the very consciousness of people, and turned a small corner of the world, Western Europe, into a culture that in many ways conquered the world. Widespread decentralized printing and the accompanying book markets, new schools, and rise of literacy gave rise to a new form of consciousness -- book consciousness.

Colombus was among the first generation of navigators who had been reading avidly and widely since a child. On his bookshelf was Marco Polo's Travels. On his voyages he carried maps made by geographers who had been literate sincethey were children, and he carried astronomical tables that had been printed widely across Europe. These tables had been made by a Hungarian-Italian mathematician whose bookshelf was full of ancient Greek science and mathematics. Such information had been rather inferior and far less available just a few decades before.

With the easy conquest by tiny Portugal of Asia's vast and ancient sea trade routes, rapidly literizing Western Europeans were by the early 16th century demonstrating a vast superiority in naval affairs. In navigation as in battle officers using accurate charts and astronomical tables were at a premium. (Europeans did not have quite such good luck on land against the Turks). Western Europeans would retain completely uncontested (except among each other) naval superiority on the world's oceans until the Japanese victory over Russia in the early 20th century. The Japanse by then had long since taken up printing and had a very well read population . Even on the ground by the 18th century English merchants, officers, and civil servants, practically all of them literate and widely read since young children, were finding it quite easy to conquer and take over the administration in far larger and otherwise highly advanced civilizations like India.

Soon after the spread of the printing press, the very fundamentals of organization in Western Europe began to change. In the late Middle Ages organizations, even royal and papal bureaucracies and banking "super-companies", rarely engaged more than a few dozen employees. Organizational size came up against the severe limit of the Dunbar number. By the end ofthe 16th century, the colonial companies and bureaucracies of Spain and Portugal were vast, highly literate, and well coordinated. Officer corps had often been raised on military books and thus able to draw lessons from a wide variety of ancient and recent battles. Even a minor salt extractor in Wear, England, was employing 300 men by the mid 16th century. (Large organizations in manufacturing would largely have to wait until the 18th century and the industrial revolution, however).

Before book consciousness there had been no national languages, but only a range of often mutually incomprehensible dialects and in Western Europe the language of the tiny literate elite, Latin. With newly unified national vernaculars, organizations were able to coordinate and grow in an unprecedented manner. A much larger group of people, raised on the same written language, increasingly also came to look and speak similarlyand become far more mutually trusted. It was the birth of national loyalty and nationwide webs of trust. The "tribe" to which we are instinctively loyal vastly increased in size. The pool of already somewhat trusted "same tribe" people from which a bureacracy could recruit new members vastly increased. National polities and militaries were able to coordinate political, economic, and battlefield strategies in an unprecedentedmanner. The 16th century saw the first major growth of the joint-stock corporation, enabling far more capital to be invested in the enlarging organizations that engaged in mining and manufacture as well as government and conquest. This development is probably a response to the new ability to form larger organizations, since the basic ideas (corporate law, shares of stock, etc.) had already been in use in Europe for quite some time. Some of the early English 16th century joint-stock companies included military expeditions (Drake's privateering voyages and naval actions were financed through joint stock companies: a different company for each expedition), trading and slaving companies (the Muscovy and Guniea companies) and mining and manufacturing companies (the Royal Mining Company and the Royal Batteries & Mines Company). The most famous became the English East India Company, but many of the American colonies were also joint-stock corporations. The first widely traded and initially most successful joint-stock company was the Dutch East India company,which quickly grew far beyond the Dunbar number to have thousands of employees.

Book consciousness changed almost every profession. Good books on a trade could greatly increase the knowledge imparted during apprenticeships, and indeed eventually led to the end of the apprecenticeship system. Meanwhile, widely printed books on mathematics and science, such as Euclid's Geometry, gave knowledge that could be used in a wide variety of occupations, and training was often restructured to assume and build upon such new general knowledge. This led to a profound change in labor productivity, moving mankind away from the Malthusian curve and (along with the expansion of organizational size beyond the Dunbar limit) eventually to the industrial revolution.

A typical example of the rise of book consciousness was the radical improvement in how cases were reported in the English legal system by the late 16th century. For the first time, cases and statutes were widely and accurately cited. This reflected the fact that judges, barristers, attorneys, and even some of the parties had for the first time printed books of statutes and cases at their fingertips -- instead of having to find the single copy of a scroll hidden away in some monk's or bureacrat's library. The first great English opinion writer, Sir Edward Coke, dates from this period. In turn, the wide availability of printed statute and case law led to basic changes in the way we interpret and view the law.

Almost invariably, during the colonial period, when largely illiterate cultures (i.e. cultures where mostof the second-tier nobility, military officers, and merchants, and almostall craftsmen and farmers, had not been raised on books) were encountered by literate Europeans, the latter described the former with severe ephithats, suchas "savages." This makes our forbears seem odious to us, who understand that all human races are capable of literacy, and indeed by now book consciousness has spread to most of the globe and most of us encounter a widevariety of highly literate people every day. However, at least in the 16th century for book-raised Western Europeans this was not so much a racialprejudice as a largely accurate observation. "Savage" was applied not only to neolithic Africans and Americans, but also to Irish backlanders and Scottish highlanders. There was a similar Western European attitude to otherwise very advanced civilizations in India and China. From the 16th century onward, any culture that did not have book consciousness was a culture of savages.

It's possible that today the availability of thousands of times still more material to read, readily accessible by search engine, and the expansion of a small number language groups (but especially English) to a worldwide real-time network is creating a new "Internet consciousness." People within this network may soon come to see people outside of it as savages. But that is a topic for another post.

Charters and judicial review

There is a long-standing controversy about the idea of parliamentary supremacy -- the idea that legislative law trumps all other law. That is currently the dominant theory in England, but the United States holds a contrary view -- here judges review legislative laws against a prior and higher law: a written constitution (and perhaps also against natural law, but that is a subject we won't pursue here).

Parliamentary supremacy was not always the view in England. Sir Edward Coke, for example, considered some old statutes and case precedents part of a higher "common law" that could on occasion trump statute. Coke's doctrine was not overtly repudiated by English legal courts for several hundred years, but neither was it strictly followed by later judges. Parliamentary supremacy was a major legal issue in the American Revolution which separated the United States from England.

One of the problems with the modern debate over this issue is that the question is put in modern terms that assume that statute and case law where on point must always be followed --the modern rigid view of written law. But this was, if out of practical necessity if for no other reason, not the medieval view of the law. Books (or, more often, scrolls) of statutes and case records were often locked in dusty libraries where students and barristers and attorneys and even judges had difficulty gaining access to them. Sometimes they had simply been destroyed. As a result, prior to the 16th century printed editions, much of the learning about the law came from oral instruction rather than books. It was gestalt in nature. This rendered it, by our standards,very flexible but also disconcertingly uncertain. Not only did judges sometimes forget statutes and cases; they could often also effectively just ignore statute or case precedent if they felt it didn't lead to a just outcome in the case at hand. The legal historian Theodore Plucknett, for example, recorded several medieval cases where statutory law was clearly on point but ignored. Judges thus could effectively nullify statutory law, which is even more powerful than the ability to review statutes against a higher law. Records of cases prior to the 16th only rarely cite either statutes or prior cases, but simply declare what the interlocutor believes the law to be.

Another crucial point is that up to the 16th century in England (and even, at least nominally, somewhat later) parliamentary statute was consideredto be an opinion about what the law was, not a statement of new law. The same held true for case precedent (and nominally still does even up to today). Of course, in reality law was always evolving, and statutes might indeed radically change things. But this ancient attitude towards the law was plausible at the time, again due to the primarily oral nature of the law, and it had legal consequences. It meant, first of all, that the modern "last-in-time rule" (when two statutes conflict, the later statute has effectively repealed the earlier one) was not in force -- a later statute could be reviewed equally against an earlier statute and the judge could decide which version most suited the case. Thus the earlier statute was neither a higher law (as in modern judicial review against a constitution), nor a lower law (as in the modern "last-in-time" rule) but merely another opinion about the law to be weighed against the more recent opinion. The more recent or more ancient statute might weigh more heavily depending on which was considered more authoritative Secondly, the fact that statutes were merely an opinion about the law, not the law itself, gave a judge justification to ignore them when they felt they were not very authoritative, which for the practical reasons cited above they often did. If you couldn't remember the law but had to look it up (which before printed editions could involve quite a bit of trouble), it probably was not so authoritative. Third, it meant that there could be two leading theories about judicial review against case law:

(1) Parliamentary statutes trump cases from the Kings Bench, Chancery, and other courts because Parliament is the highest court in the land.

(2) Parliamentary statutes are simply dicta (since they typically did not involve a specific case and controversy brought to trial), and therefore take lower priority than case precedent.

I'm not aware of any participant in this debate expressing the second theory, but some might have thought it implied, as I do. The first theory has often been cited as the leading argument for parliamentary supremacy, but not much before Blackstone made it popular in the late 18th century.

Sir Edward Coke, the leading opponent of Parliamentary supremacy, (and whose opinion in Dr. Bonham's case is perhaps the only unequivocal precedent against such supremacy), muddled the issue by often quoting at least one old statute, the Magna Carta, as a law that trumped later statute. Coke effectively treated the Magna Carta as the United States treats our Constitution. In the habits of the time, he simply weighed its authority very highly. An argument for Coke's view is that Magna Carta took the form of a property grant that effected the entire property of the realm (including all incorporeal rights, such as what we call civil liberties), and that it was a charter for England itself analogous to the charters the king was granting for early American colonies at the time, which trumped the statutes of the resulting colonial legislatures.

But Coke also considered certain long-standing procedural doctrines derived from case precedent, such as the right to a properly trained judge, to be part of the higher law against which statutes should be reviewd. He did not consider most everyday aspects of what we now call the common law (the law of real property, tort, etc.) to be part of this higher common law that trumped statute. Rather, the higher common law was confined to certain important procedural rights, similar in style to those later found in the United States Bill of Rights.

Americans had a stronger case for judicial review. First, our (mostly corporate) colonial governments were franchises expressly set up by charter. The power of colonial legislatures was thus not unlimited, but rather was constrained by clauses in the charter. Colonial legislators could not, for example, deny the king his right to customs, and could not contravene the English liberties of residents, since these rights were both expressly reserved in the charter grants. So judicial review became the American habit from the start. Second, these charters were printed, thus immediately available to the judge and all parties; this and the fact that they were a higher law than local legislative statute helped them to be applied, using the modern view of written law, and a strict way. (The extent to which Parliamentary statute applied to the colonies, beyond the extent to which Parliament could regulate the king's customs and military affairs, and whether Parliamentary statutes could themselves be reviewed, per Coke, and against what,were far more controversial issues, and played a leading role in the Revolution). As a practical matter, Americans also got in the habit of conducting judicial review of statutes, and thus in contrast to English judges acquired much practical experience at the task. Judicial review of statutes is not something one immediately learns to do once one thinks of the idea, and if one has not learned how to do it properly, it's easy to imagine why one would be opposed to the idea.

Update, Sept. 14th 2006: Todd Zywicki has made similar points about case law, precedent, and the doctrine of stare decisis in his paper "The Rise and Fall of of Efficiency in Common Law: A Supply Side Analysis," available at SSRN. Before the printing press, and to some extent for several centuries thereafter, case precedent was very hard to access through other than oral communications and was considered more or less authorattive according to a variety of factors rather than followed rigidly. Thus stare decisis, the modern doctrine that courts must follow precedent, was not rigidly adhered to. I'd also add something that Zywicki's account and my own research experience with medieval cases implies, namely that the the idea of "overturning" a case was unknown. A contradictory older case could always be treated as more authoratitive than the more recent case, or vice versa, in parallel with the lack of a "last-in-time" rule for statute law.

Smart contracts in pieces

One thing I've notice as smart contracts have been evolving (rather obliviously to the idea of smart contracts) is that they are being implemented in little pieces. For example, instead of the full-blown protocol I describe in that article, wherein the ability of one's car to start is automatically tied to the lateness of one's payments, the "auto repo auto" has been implemented as a somewhat simpler gizmo that responds to radio signals from a trusted (and legally regulated) party: a "starter-interrupt device." Instead of a full-blown market translator, we get simple gizmos like this price-sensitive thermostat. Both the market translator and the price-sensitive thermostat reduce mental transaction costs by obtaining consumer preferences and translating them into purchasing decisions. The price-sensitive thermostat has the advantage that people already enter their preferences into thermostats, so there is already a digital source of preferences.

Customer value meter

When you call Cingular customer service, the customer representative you talk to learns your value to the company via this handy meter. You may or may not be eligible for various discount offers, depending on how much business you've done with the company in the past (life time value) and whether they expect you to stay with them in the future (churn potential). Churn potential is perhaps based on how hard it would be for you to switch to a competitor. Many companies track data related to these two variables, but this widget distills it all down for the operator you talk to.




Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.

Security and the origins of agriculture

Climate-based explanations for the birth of agriculture are nonsense (like this one, via Marginal Revolution, which adds further nonsense about agriculture having originated around rivers). Their popularity stems from little more than the climate being an easily measured variable. There was plenty of good land quite suitable for agriculture in temperate climates (and, more importantly, in thousands of temperate microclimates) during the last Ice Age. There were many areas even during the coldest part of the Ice Age that satisfied the climate, soil, ecology, and other environmental requirements of early agriculture. They were just closer to the equator.

More likely explanations for the agricultural revolution are probably far less observable:

The crucial role of security for the history of farming may also shed light on the birth of agricultural in the first place. Hunter-gatherers were very knowledgeable about plants and animals, far more than the typical modern. It would not have taken a genius -- and there were many, as their brains were as large as ours -- to figure out that you can plant a seed into the ground and it will grow. There must have been, rather, some severe institutional constraints that prevented agriculture from arising in the first place. The basic problem is that somebody has to protect that seedling for several months from enemies, and then has to harvest it before the enemy (or simply a envious neighbor) does. Security and allocation of property rights between providers of security and providers of farm labor were the intractable problems that took vast amounts of trial and error as well as genius to solve in order for agriculture to take root.

This would also explain how agriculture could spread from a single innovation yet look like independent inventions in the archaeological record. There were at least eight centers of secondary innovations (e.g. crop and livestock domestications and agricultural tools) that look independent: the Middle East, China, India, sub-Saharan Africa, Peru, central America, eastern North America, and New Guinea. But they all occured within a few thousand years of each other, after at least 100,000 years of anatomically modern humans. During these millenia humans were without agriculture despite large numbers of microclimates and microecologies suitable for agriculture during that entire period.

This indicates the slow spread (with many failed attempts and, quite likely, many reversals) of a primary innovation necessary for the use of these secondary innovations. The primary innovation had to be primarily cultural rather than genetic because it came long after the out-migration from Africa c. 80K-40K BP and was taken up by many of the genetically diverse results of that out-migration. Given what we know about the importance of cooperation, institutions, and security to the productivity of human economies, that innovation which slowly spread and made agriculture possible was almost surely an innovation in the culture of cooperation. Alas, the spread of such an innovation in oral culture can be observed at best indirectly in the archaeological record.

This would put the origins of agricultural into the more general large patterns of history, the most important of which are based on the interaction between security and wealth.

Constitution Society

John Roland's constitution.org is an exceptional resource on United States constitutional law.

Prion evolution

Prions are alternatively folded proteins that catalyze the same alternative foldings in other (usually otherwise identical) proteins. Like DNA, prions can be replicators that undergo Darwinian selection:

...although the prion “option” [analogous to a gene with two alleles] is clearly subject to conventional Darwinian evolution, in the case of [the prion's] natural selection [the prion] is acting on a non-mendelian, non-genetically encoded trait.

Prions are a protein analog of disappearing polymorphs in crystals. With two "options" the prion as replicator only contains one bit of information, but that's enough to make a difference.

One of the most interesting questions raised is when prions will act more like genes (and thus be largely beneficial to the organism) and when will they act more like harmful diseases. Prion diseases include Creutzfeld-Jacob and "mad cow" disease. According to the replicator/vehicle theory described by Richard Dawkins, if the prion passes through a similar reproductive route as a gene it will tend to be selected like a gene and thus evolve to behave more like a gene (in terms of whether its effect on the organism is helpful or harmful, not in terms of its mechanics, where a prion is very unlike a gene). But if the prion passes from one organism to another through some other route (as in the cannibalism route of mad cow disease and kuru) it will be selected more like a disease and thus behave more like a disease.

Democracy as regular rebellion

It's the eve of Independence Day here in the United States, celebrating the American insurgents who broke from England. We did have some good inspiration from the Old Countries, as described by this excerpt from a paper of mine:

In the 1560s, an “intermittent civil war” started between Protestants and Catholics in France. On St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, encouraged by the government authority, mobs murdered “as many as 10,000” Protestants, targeting their leaders. The same year, the Dutch Protestants began their rebellion against the Hapsburg monarchy. Soon thereafter, Theodore Beza, the successor to Calvin, wrote about the right of rebellion and the need to control government so that such rebellion would not be necessary. Beza’s ideas were expanded by an anonymous author, probably the Huguenot Philippe due Plessis-Mornay, in Vindicae Contra Tyrannos. (1579). “If kings commit injustices…they become the enemy,” Plessis-Mornay wrote. But if individuals determined for themselves when to revolt, the result would be violent anarchy. It was, therefore, the role of the Estates and lesser magistrates to guard individual rights against tyrants. According to constitutional historian Scott Gordon, the Huguenots “extended their argumentation to encompass less extreme conflicts between a prince and his subjects. Rebellion is exercised in extremis, but more important are the constraints that operate in ordinary times and bear upon a government that might feel quite secure against insurrection.” The Huguenots and their successors stressed two ways of controlling tyranny that remain crucial to understanding the non-delegation doctrine today: first, control by distributing and checking power; second, control by representation of interests. According to Beza, institutional organs that represent the people “are established to check and bridle the magistrate.”

John Locke elaborated on many of these ideas in his Second Treatise On Government. Since humans are unjust towards each other without government, we must form such a government through a compact with each other. We agree to surrender some of our natural rights so that government can function to preserve the remainder. “Absolute arbitrary power, or governing without settled standing laws, can neither of them consist with the ends of society and government, which men would not quit the freedom of the state of nature for, nor tie themselves up under, were it not to preserve their lives, liberties, and fortunes; and by stated rules of right and property to secure their peace and quiet.” Power is also more dangerous if concentrated: “He being in a much worse condition who is exposed to the arbitrary power of one man who has the command of 100,000, than he that is exposed to the arbitrary power of 100,000 single men.”

When judicial or executive officers distort the law, with the result that injuries go without remedy, the result is nothing less than a state of war. “Where an appeal to the law and constituted judges lies open, but the remedy is denied by a manifest perverting of justice and barefaced wrestling of the laws, to protect or indemnify the violence or injuries of some men or party of men, there it is hard to imagine anything but a state of war. For whenever violence is used and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer justice, it is still violence and injury, however colored with the name, pretences, or forms of law," Locke wrote.

References:

Scott Gordon,Controlling the State: Constitutionalism from Ancient Athens to Today (Harvard University Press 1999)

John Locke, The Second Treatise On Government (1691)