Most tribal cultures had arbitration systems without decreed (legislated) law. There is often a culturocentric misunderstanding of tribal leaders. What are often termed "kings" or "chiefs" in history books are little more than militia leaders or on-demand judges. For example, the Celtic Irish "kings" were militia commandeers with a few religious duties - they had no power to make decrees, only to lead armed defense in the event of an attack. Deliberative associations which are little more than appeals courts are often painted as legislatures, such as the Allthing of classical Iceland. You wouldn't know from most history books that Iceland had competing legal associations that David Friedman noted "might almost have been invented by a mad economist to test the lengths to which market systems could supplant government in its most fundamental functions."

Neither do most people appreciate how property law springs up spontaneously. In the settlement of North America, tomahawk rights (marking the corners of land claims with tomahawk cuts on trees), cultivation rights, homesteading rights, grazing and mining and water rights, were all worked out before formal government arrived. Governments tended to try to dispossess the "squatters" so blatantly stealing "public" land. In places where indigenous property conventions won out over government decree, squatters were renamed "pioneers" and liberty prevailed to a greater extent. In places where the state regimes dominated land use and distribution, economic and political freedom was severely retarded. We see the result in much of Latin America today, with squatter cities and property rights unrecognized except for the well-connected. How would laws be produced in an anarchist society? Let's let David Friedman tell us.

The answer is that systems of law would be produced for profit on the open market, just as books and bras are produced today. There could be competition among different brands of law, just as there is competition among different brands of cars.

In such a society there might be many courts and even many legal systems. Each pair of protection agencies agree in advance on which court they will use in case of conflict. Thus the laws under which a particular case is decided are determined implicitly by advance agreement between the protection agencies whose customers are involved. In principle, there could be a different court and a different set of laws for every pair of protection agencies. In practice, many agencies would probably find it convenient to patronize the same courts, and many courts might find it convenient to adopt identical, or nearly identical, systems of law in order to simplify matters for their customers.