Sorry I'm late to the first question; I didn't look where I was clicking 
and responded to an individual rather than the list.

One would expect that at some point this practice would have become the 
focus of a court case; however, while I admit that I have not read every 
colonial court case, I have spent a great deal of time reviewing 
numerous cases and have never encountered any reference to such a practice.

Barbara Vines Little, CG, FNGS, FUGA, FVGS
PO Box 1273
Orange, VA 22960

540-832-3473
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CG, Certified Genealogist, is a service mark of the Board for Certification of Genealogists, used
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On 7/5/2017 11:19 AM, Jon Kukla wrote:
> In an essay on the Constitution published in Sunday's NYT, Garry Wills
> explains James Madison's thinking about factions and the common good by
> suggesting that Madison's ideas reflected "a common practice" that Will
> describes as follows:
>
> "When a landowner in Virginia wished to sell property, neither he nor his
> potential buyer was allowed to set the price. That would be acting as
> judges in their own case. Instead, each chose a reputable arbiter, one
> likely to be respected by each of them and by others; those representatives
> chose a third person, who would, with them, set a price that all could
> accept as 'disinterested.'"
>
> Sounds like a form of arbitration, but I'm not familiar with it in 18th-c
> Virginia land transactions.
> I'm especially skeptical about Wills's assertion that parties to a private
> land sale would not have been "allowed to set the price."
>
>

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