Unequal legal status makes trust between citizens impossible

Evidence

For no one will be prepared to trust another who enjoys a different legal status to himself. The positive laws of the community are also, Genovesi insisted, civil contracts, and contracts, of course, rely more heavily upon trust than they do upon the possibility — always precarious — of enforcing them. In the absence of trust, he pointed out, ‘there can be no certainty in contracts and hence no force to the laws’, and a society in that condition is effectively reduced ‘to a state of semi-savagery’ (1803: 113-16). The Spaniards had succeeded in destroying the purchase of the laws on the community by subverting the customs which sustained them; they had destroyed the rule of law by setting up separate courts both for the barony and for the priesthood and by allowing into the legal system entire categories of exemptions and exceptions so that no one could predict the outcome of a case or know which part of the law applied to him. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1837

Categorization

• XREF: Genovesi’s claim that contracts rest on trust more than enforcement directly corroborates Hardin’s argument that trust requires observable constraints; legal unpredictability destroys the observability that underwrites trust.
• QUESTION: A useful template: does Saramago’s blindness epidemic produce legal uncertainty (unpredictable outcomes) that itself erodes whatever trust observers could maintain?