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Gypsy law

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Abstract

How do the members of societies that can’t use government or simple ostracism produce social order? To investigate this question I use economics to analyze Gypsy law. Gypsy law leverages superstition to enforce desirable conduct in Gypsy societies where government is unavailable and simple ostracism is ineffective. According to Gypsy law, unguarded contact with the lower half of the human body is ritually polluting, ritual defilement is physically contagious, and non-Gypsies are in an extreme state of such defilement. These superstitions repair holes in simple ostracism among Gypsies, enabling them to secure social cooperation without government. Gypsies’ belief system is an efficient institutional response to the constraints they face on their choice of mechanisms of social control.

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Notes

  1. Gypsy population estimates vary wildly. These estimates are notoriously unreliable because Gypsies don’t typically classify themselves as such when asked, like other people on the fringe of society are among the least likely to be counted in official census measures, and are commonly confused with various other ethnicities by officials. All such estimates should be taken with a grain of salt. However, according to one estimate, there are some 3–15 million Gypsies worldwide living in 40 countries (Weyrauch and Bell 1993: 340). This figure of course includes all Gypsy groups, not just the Vlax Roma.

  2. Though not technically a religion, this belief system, which defines ritually pure and impure, or moral and immoral, things/actions has religious/spiritual aspects. Gypsies’ belief system might be described as a folk religion and is typically adhered to alongside an at least professed belief in the dominant religion (some variety of Christianity) of the host country in which a Gypsy society is located.

  3. The residents of the countries to which Roma migrated dubbed them “Gypsies” because they mistakenly believed that the Roma had migrated from Egypt.

  4. Gypsies have been persecuted since this time. In some places they continue to suffer persecution today. For an account of the history of Gypsy persecution, see Hancock (1987).

  5. Other prominent subgroups include the Finnish Kaale, located in Northern Europe, the Iberian Kaale, located in Spain and neighboring countries, the Sinti, located in German-speaking Europe, and the Romanichal, located in the United Kingdom.

  6. These categories may overlap. For example, contact with fecal matter is both physically and, according to Romaniya, ritually polluting.

  7. My description of Romaniya below, and my description of Gypsy organization above, is based on the (largely overlapping) descriptions provided in Brown (1929), Clébert (1963), Lee (1967, 1997), Yoors (1967), Trigg (1973), Gropper (1975), Miller (1975), Sutherland (1975), Liégeois (1986), Sway (1988), and Weyrauch and Bell (1993).

  8. For example, I don’t consider purity rules relating to pregnancy and childbirth, which are quite remarkable in their own right.

  9. Weyrauch and Bell (1993: 337) translate gaje loosely as “barbarians.”

  10. On Gypsies’ economic activities and strategies, see Lauwagie (1979), Williams (1982), and Silverman (1982).

  11. For an odd defense of Gypsy criminality, see Lee (1967).

  12. There’s some evidence that Gypsies engage in rent seeking by lobbying local public officials to keep fortune-telling illegal as a means of restricting entry into this industry; see Tyrner-Stastny (1977: 38).

  13. Gypsy nomadism is less pronounced today than it was in past. However, it remains an important part of many Gypsies’ lifestyles and identities.

  14. On the possibility of self-enforcing exchange in large, socially heterogeneous populations, see Leeson (2008).

  15. In some cases Gypsies also permit women to attend and participate.

  16. Kaale kin groups tend to pursue economic activities in separate territories, each group viewing one territory as its own. Thus those groups monopolize the regions in which they live. However, this “cartelization” is different from the Vlax Roma’s. Kaale cartelization is informal and tacit. Vlax Roma cartels are explicit inter-kumpania agreements to restrict competition.

  17. Finnish Kaale Gypsies do in fact “divorce” just as they “marry” clandestinely and without acknowledgement. However, since, like marriage, divorce officially doesn’t exist, the potential conflicts that require adjudication when American Vlax Roma marriages end don’t, and in fact can’t, create conflicts when Finnish Kaale Gypsy (non-)marriages end.

  18. On the law and economics of blood feuding along the 16th-century Anglo-Scottish border, see Leeson (2009c).

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Acknowledgements

I thank Gary Becker, Pete Boettke, Chris Coyne, Tom Ginsburg, Robert Lawson, Richard McAdams, Richard Posner, Jens Prüfer, Jesse Shapiro, Andrei Shleifer, and William F. Shughart II for helpful suggestions and conversation. Dan Smith provided valuable research assistance. I also thank the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago where I conducted this research.

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  1. Department of Economics, George Mason University, MS 3G4, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Peter T. Leeson

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Correspondence to Peter T. Leeson.

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Leeson, P.T. Gypsy law. Public Choice 155, 273–292 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-012-0048-4

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