Guests on BBC Radio 4's long-running Desert Island Discs are invited to engage in agreeable discussion of their life's work, all set to a soundtrack of their choice. The discussion and music is the prelude to being banished to a fictional desert island. They are asked to choose a luxury item. But never, I think, has a guest been asked: “to which sovereign state will you bear allegiance?” Or: “which law would you apply on your island?” Perhaps Kirsty Young should add this question to her list, for the answer is fraught with difficulty. “Desert Island scenarios” says George Letsas in his contribution to the present volume, “are the political philosopher's test tube” (157). And so too are they for lawyers: can law exist without legal institutions? Can legal institutions exist without a state or vice versa? In his solitude between 1704 and 1707 on one of the Juan Fernández Islands – renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966 – did Alexander Selkirk need Scots law? Did he need law at all? Does the legal vacuum exist? If not, which law applies? Since 1707, despite their colossal contribution to the British Empire, Scotsmen and Scotswomen, for reasons unexplained, were never able to take Scots law abroad: see (Justice) B H McPherson, “Scots Law in the Colonies” 1995 JR 191. Imperial law – civil, criminal and martial – was always English.
Turning from radio to cinema, the 1935 film, Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, was based on real events. In 1790, HM Armed Vessel Bounty, under the command of Captain Bligh (Laughton in the film), was returning from Tahiti to the Caribbean. The crew, “by no means the last Europeans to be seduced by the exotic”, as Andrew Lewis puts it (39), mutinied rather than be forced to leave the Pacific islands. The captain and twenty-one men were cast adrift in an open launch in which they sailed 3,600 miles to Timor – itself an extraordinary feat of navigation and endurance. But the story of the Bounty is not about them. It is about the mutineers, led by Fletcher Christian (the brother of Edward, the editor of Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, 12th edn (1793–1795)). They landed on Pitcairn Island, a tiny island some 3,000 miles from New Zealand and 3,000 miles from Chile. With them were twelve Tahitian women and seven men, each most likely landed against his or her will. And there these fugitives from the Royal Navy lived, cultivated, procreated, and fought. Of the nine original mutineers, only...
