As I'm working on my essay review of David Rabban's new book I've been reading a bunch of James Coolidge Carter — and other members of the late nineteenth century school of historical jurisprudence (broadly defined). Probably reading more of this than it's smart too — and might I just add that some of that legal history is boring. But right now I'm interested in this passage, which links the role of judges and umpires in sports — and also uses it to analogize to how rules emerge from the common culture of the people governed:
In all athletic games, baseball, cricket, or prize fighting, a referee is appointed to see fair play. There are no commands preceeding from a sovereign, or superiors, to subjects, or inferiors; but there is a standard of justice founded upon the habits and usages of the game, and there is consequently a law yhich it is the function of the referee to declare. We have here in miniature the whole scheme of human justice.