"In the British common law system that the United States inherited, competition could be policed through tort liability - the legal system by which those harmed by the actions of another person or entity can be compensated - even when a state-granted monopoly did not exist. There was legal precedent, for example, allowing merchants in a particular area to sue competitors who had recently entered the same geographic location."
"That same common law system enforced a version of NIMBYism that was extreme even by the standards of the most development-hostile neighborhoods in the Western world today. Any property owner who sought to build something that did not correspond to "natural" uses of land - defined so as to freeze the status quo in legal amber - could be sued by owners of adjacent properties. These legal standards all worked, more or less, until the dynamism made possible by the Industrial Revolution."
Free enterprise formed a central premise of the American experiment, yet early American law often treated competition as legally uncertain. Corporate law focused on state-granted charters conferring monopoly rights for infrastructure projects, enforceable against new entrants. British common law practices allowed competition to be policed through tort liability and enabled merchants to sue recent entrants; the same system enforced stringent NIMBY restrictions by allowing adjacent owners to sue structures deviating from "natural" land uses. These legal norms were sustainable when economic change was slow, but the Industrial Revolution created dynamism that required legal adaptation. Legal culture will profoundly shape incentives and contours of the coming revolution in AI.
Read at Big Think
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