Rise of the samurai lawyers

Peter Leeson : The Kamakura Bakufu (literally "tent government") was born in medieval Japan .

He says the samurai were a class of skilled professional warriors, experts in deadly force.

They depended on others for any rights they had to land or its product, he says.

Leeson says the organization was a corporate body of samurai that provided governance services to its members.

The Kamakura Bakufu lasted 148 years in Japan and Europe .

The law's main concerns were to restrain and regulate authority, to limit samurai violence, to ensure orderly inheritance and property transfer.

The body of law that the court applied is laid out in a compilation of norms and precedents drawn up in 1232 .

The rule of law is not a natural or universal feature of human society; oppressive and arbitrary rule has been common throughout history.

But sometimes, despite all the obstacles, a stable and relatively just legal order can arise.

Whatever produced the process, it wasn't inevitable, writes Peter Bergen .