Deodands put a price on objects that caused death

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 and still follows it.

The interesting question is: Why were trains supposedly fatal to the law of deodands whereas ships were not?

I think that it has much more to do with the decline of superstition from roughly the second half of the 18th century on -- courts began to view the old law as an irrational relic, and it gradually fell out of legal fashion.

This is only tangentially on-topic, but the opening anecdote about the floor collapse immediately reminded me of the Erfurt latrine disaster. If you aren't already familiar, count yourself as one of today's lucky 10k people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt_latrine_disaster

>What would a medieval jury do, tasked to rule on an AI encouraging suicide or murder?

An interesting conundrum. Is the maker of the AI considered to have been practicing magic and summoning a demon? The user? What's the movable chattel object in this case?

Fundament: an archaic or formal term for the buttocks/anus.

Yer welcome.