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Scott Alexander in his recent links post highlights an interesting idea on how to deal with violation of court orders, make them an outlaw , https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-april-2025 (Edit: To clarify, this is most likely not a fully serious idea. Scott would understand how difficult it would be to actually implement, I'm just analyzing it as if it were serious and how that would work with US law.)
Taking this idea seriously, it's hard to see how it manifests in the US. Assuming no change to the constitution, which is possible but I think unlikely to convince enough citizens to go for such a change, the protection of the law is clearly outlined to any person within our jurisdiction in the 14th amendment.
In theory we could radically reinterpret jurisdiction as being "within the law" and thus said "outlaws" being outside the law would not be in jurisdiction but that is a pretty far stretch. It also makes an interesting logical question, if they're outside of US jurisdiction then are they really defying the courts anymore?
Another possible theory could hinge on a different odd and radical reinterpretation of wording,
A radical interpretation of "life" or "liberty" could include removing the status of personhood from violators, therefore removing them from the "any person" line.
Both of these are incredibly radical. The US system is not fully originalist but even the more broader minded living constitutionalists and textualists tend to take the original intent into some amount of consideration and there isn't really any mention of stripping personhood away. And even then, it's still a stretch that one can take away personhood when our definition of person has little to do with one's involvement in the legal system anyway. I don't think many would contest Shakespeare or Genghis Khan as "people" despite being born and dead before the US even existed. And defining outlaws as outside the law could end up suggesting we can not enforce rules on them either if they decide to do something like steal or murder and just hope a citizen takes action to fix it.
Even more so, it remains to be seen if such a thing would even be necessary. I'm not aware of many cases where a ruled upon contempt of court hasn't been resolved in some sort of favorable manner for the courts (an arrest, a fine, obeying the courts after the order, etc) and the ones where it doesn't happen are people who hide away or flee the country. Declaring someone an outlaw and stripping away their legal protections doesn't really help too much in the police not being able to find them, unless we want the outlaw status to allow police to violate the rights of non-outlaws in their search for outlaws.
And even the most famous examples of court defiance tend to be apocryphal historical information, a misunderstanding of the orders by laymen or a mix of the two. Sometimes political leaders will even mislead about their actions, presenting an appearance of "fighting back" for their base while actually pivoting to another strategy that hasn't been ruled on yet. Actually serious major defiance of court rulings just hasn't really happened and thus the need for an alternative solution seems questionable IMO.
Ok but let's assume that the constitution does get changed. Maybe Scott runs for president on the "Let's change the constitution to make outlaws" platform, and the voters all surge for pro outlaw amendment congressmen and governors, and even the politicians currently on the fence are convinced of this idea. What then? That's already been covered decently in depth by Scott years ago and I don't know if I can add too much for this. I don't have much knowledge about the medieval Icelandic system beyond what I learned from this article. But regardless I think the likelihood of such a change is so low the discussion is purely in the hypothetical at this point.
More likely IMO (although still highly unlikely) would be to adopt the punishment of exile. Why do I think this is relatively more likely? It has history in the Roman legal system and British law systems which are already major inspirations for the American legal system so adopting anything from them is more precedented and that precedent may be more convincing to the population for a new amendment.
Scott of course shows his true colors again as a rabid partisan, by advocating literally unpersoning his political opponents.
In terms of the actual proposal, I don't see him argue in any sensible way why contempt isn't an adequate method of enforcement. Sure the courts may be slow sometimes, but they can be fast when they want to be. And his proposed "unpersoning" would also require the courts to make a move, so no reason for that to be any faster.
Scott Alexander is hysterically overrated just because he actually criticized wokes a bit back during the era where the spineless techies that make up his fandom were busy cowering and licking progressive boots.
That's not fair, he used to be a good writer that used to be able to show he properly understood the arguments he disagreed with.
He used to be a somewhat ordinary young man with an eclectic reading habit, allowing him to mix weird rationality ideas while still understanding the opposite perspective. Then he became an incredibly successful and popular writer and moved to San Francisco where he now lives with his wife, children and mistress.
No matter how much he tries, if he does still try, he can’t really empathise with the people outside the blessed circle. They’re just too different from him now. At the same time, general political polarisation has continued to the extent that I doubt he ever meets any right wingers any more, even the weird kind.
It’s the same problem that’s occurred since time immemorial and is the reason why (as I understand it) Republican politicians were discouraged from spending too much time in Washington.
Wait, mistress?
Quote from Highlights From the Comments on Polyamory:
Every time I'm reminded of that quote, I'm reminded of a person who insisted with a straight face that they were mature enough to sleep with a subordinate without it compromising their leadership of their team.
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