Hammurabi
lived 1800 BCE
A ruler in ancient Babylon. His face hangs on a wall of the US Department of Justice because he wrote almost the first written set of laws, the Code of Hammurabi, now 3800 years old. It had some features ensuring the functioning of society that Nassim Taleb claims modern law does not, at least with allocation of responsibility, ensuring that each servant of the people had "skin in the game" and would not have been able to e.g. tank the stock market and get away with a promotion.
That touches on the medieval principle of lex talionis ('the law of the tooth') which the Code also encoded, i.e. the principle that "if a man pokes out another's eye, he shall have his own poked out". But Taleb was talking more about failing to deliver on a guarantee e.g. if a house builder in ancient Babylon builds a house which falls in on a family and kills them, he's to be killed too, thus he has just as much interest in making someone else's house sturdy as he would his own house. This is called ensuring that the guarantor has "skin in the game", aligning their incentives with the consumer.
We probably have plenty of reason in modern society to have stopped applying this grade of revenge-justice, but the thing is we often don't apply any justice at all on politicians and high-up advisors. And that's the place where it may make the most sense to apply lex talionis: they are supposed to be making guarantees for a whole lot of people at once, and the least you can do when an economic bubble bursts and loads of people end up on the street is that the responsible politican does too.