What’s unusual about the Irish material is that it’s all spelled out so clearly. This is partly because Irish law codes were the work of a class of legal specialists who seem to have turned the whole business almost into a form of entertainment, devoting endless hours to coming up with every possible ramification of existing legal principles, whether or not there was any real possibility such a case might end up in court. Some of the provisos are so whimsical (“if stung by another man’s bee, one must calculate the extent of the injury, but also, if one swatted it in the process, subtract the
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