My point in bringing up segregation wasn't about the selection process, but the outcome. I believe that if two groups of people are given different variants of a law to live by, one of those groups is going to discover a way to use the difference in the laws to gain an economic, social, or political advantage over the other group. As soon as that happens, you've got state-mandated discrimination, and we already know how that turns out.
Not necessarily always the case. Anyway, the author isn't suggesting that we do this in all areas of society. Just the ones that fit the experimental structure pretty well. Using the articles examples of education and crime -- seems pretty difficult to imagine criminals gaining advantages over each other b/c they had different rehab experiences.
Also, "[using] the difference in the laws to gain an ... advantage" does not equal state mandated discrimination. It's more of a state-accepted, or allowed, discrimination. State mandated discrimination is something a little more explicit, like when Zimbabwe's President Mugabe enacted laws that took land from one racial group and bequeathed it to another.
There are already ways in which people are given different variants of a law to live by, perhaps due to selective enforcement and because people with wealth and power are given a lot more slack than nobodys. Compared to that, these sorts of experiments, limited in both scope and deployment, seem quite reasonable.
