how does linden labs recognize/enforce in-world agreements

Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience."

Grunion proposes a scenario that has potential. We could debate the logic of the process for weeks.

My question comes from a legal realist perspective:
Has anyone seen a system like this, or any part of it, actually tried and tested in SL?

If so, how did it work in practice? I'd love to look at the experience.

If a system like this has enough utility, I'd expect it to emerge from the interactions of our 86,000 + citizens. Maybe not yet, maybe next month.

I know that several citizens have tried to create arbitration/mediation services and even a "Superior Court". Perhaps some experience has come out of those experiments. If so, what has that experience been? How has it differed from Grunion's concept?

Frank

Ebay may offer some lessons for the SL economy. Sellers (and buyers!) are rated by each other after every transaction. Too many unfavorable ratings will lead to drops in sales, as no one wants to buy from a seller who is rated poorly.

An interesting byproduct of this reputation economy is an online mediation service, squaretrade.com. An instructor in a mediation course I recently attended says she makes a reasonably good living mediating disputes between buyers and sellers, frequently initiated by a seller who wants to preserve the reputation as an honest seller. Resolutions there, she says, usually involve satisfying disgruntled buyers in exchange for removal of unfavorable ratings of the sellers.

I haven't read Terms of Service closely, but following some other discussions it appears that TOS prohibits, or at least discourages, disparaging other users, so turning SL into a true reputation economy might require some revision to TOS. Nevertheless, eBay style ratings might be a useful addition to SL.