The Medieval Law That Made Trains Pay for Killing People

The article belabors the point a little bit. A deodand was any inanimate object directly linked to a human fatality -- from a runaway cart to a falling branch -- and it was usually condemned and destroyed. (Or surrendered to the King and then sold, depending.)

There was often some hair-splitting involved, but the law of deodands was on the books for hundreds of years in England, and it reflects still older Greek and Hebrew laws where inanimate objects that killed people were cast out or destroyed.

The railways did contribute to the end of the custom. But this is not simply because rail equipment was too expensive to seize or condemn. Richard Posner, in The Problems of Jurisprudence, notes:

> [The law of deodands] eventually became dysfunctional but, as Holmes explained, the old law turned out to have a new use. The victim of a maritime accident may encounter great difficulty in trying to obtain legal redress

directly against the owner of the ship that did the harm, because the

owner may live far away, quite possibly in a foreign jurisdiction. By

analogy to the law of deodands, why not treat the ship itself as the

wrongdoer, and hence let the victim sue the ship in the first port in

which it berths after the accident? Until the suit is resolved, the ship will

not be allowed to leave the port unless the ship's owner or master posts

a bond. In this way the victim can obtain and collect a judgment without

traveling to the owner's domicile. Admiralty law adopted this approach […]