ABSTRACT
This chapter looks closely at the emergence of law within Lambda-MOO through the early part of 1996. It examines the rise of the legislative system, the nature of the mechanisms for resolving disputes, and the kinds of disputes that have arisen within the MOO. The chapter looks at central debate over the nature of law within LambdaMOO: many players wish to make Lambda Law better defined and increasingly formalized, whereas a number of other participants want it to become less formal and legalistic or even hope to abolish it altogether. It sketches number of possible ways of modeling the relationship between Lambda Law and real-world law. For both the resisters and the formalizers, anxieties about the meaning of LambdaMOO are played out in the sphere of law. The chapter argues that the best model is the one that gives LambdaMOO the greatest possible amount of legal autonomy- and thus the greatest potential for becoming an imaginative space for legal experimentation.
