Brehon law system -- Irish Restorative Justice

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The Brehon law system did not use prisons. This is one of the most immediately striking features of the most sophisticated native legal system in medieval Europe — a system developed and maintained over centuries in one of the most litigious cultures on earth, a culture that distinguished between seventeen different categories of homicide, calculated the legal value of every tree in the forest by species and age, specified the exact compensation owed for every gradation of insult from a minor slight to a public humiliation, and did all of this without the concept of imprisonment as a punishment or a deterrent.

The Brehon law system was based on compensation — the idea that a wrong creates a debt, and that the appropriate response to a debt is its payment in full, not the infliction of further pain on the debtor. The value of the compensation was calculated according to a complex scale that incorporated the nature of the injury, the social status of both parties, the degree of intentionality, and the specific circumstances of the act. The hereditary Brehon judge's role was to determine these calculations with accuracy and impartiality, applying a body of legal precedent and principle that had been accumulated over centuries in the great law texts — the Senchus Már, the Críth Gablach, the Bretha Déin Chécht — that were the Brehon's primary reference works.

The compensation principle also meant that the legal process was oriented toward restoration rather than punishment — toward repairing the relationship between the wronged and the wrongdoer rather than simply penalising the wrongdoer. This had practical implications for the functioning of small, face-to-face communities where the wronged and the wrongdoer would continue to be neighbours, would continue to depend on each other's cooperation for survival, and where a legal system that simply extracted punishment without addressing the underlying grievance would leave the community worse off rather than better.

The Brehon approach is not ancient irrelevancy. It is a genuine alternative philosophy of justice that the contemporary world is slowly rediscovering under the name of restorative justice.

The Irish had it. They called it Brehon law. They had it for a thousand years.