Jon, I have never run into anything like this in my years of research in Colonial Virginia history.
Harold

> On July 5, 2017 at 11:19 AM Jon Kukla <[log in to unmask]> 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."
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jon Kukla                            www.jonkukla.com
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