All Posts Tagged With: "common law"

The Age of the Busybody

Busybodies. In an earlier, gentler time, every neighborhood had one. Predominantly but not exclusively female in those days, the local busybody was recognized with ease. Although the verb was mercifully unknown, she micromanaged all PTA meetings, gatherings, sales, and affairs whether or not she was chairman or even occupied a seat on the governing board. [...]

30Nov2011 | Ridgway K. Foley Jr. | 0 comments | Continued

Lysander Spooner: American Anarchist

It was in the early 1970s that I first learned of Lysander Spooner’s ideas. The six volumes of his Collected Works, which were published in 1971 and which I purchased soon thereafter, played an important part in my intellectual development as a voluntaryist. I was the person who in 1976 unearthed Spooner’s essay “Vices Are [...]

24Aug2011 | Carl Watner | 7 comments | Continued

The Fourth Amendment and Faulty Originalism

“All arrests are at the peril of the party making them.” —Alexander H. Stephens, August 27, 1863 These days the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution means next to nothing. Consider, for example, the choice offered a few years ago: surveillance under routine, easy “warrants” from the drive-through FISA Court or warrantless surveillance at the whim [...]

25Aug2010 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 3 comments | Continued

The Legal Foundations of Free Markets

The Legal Foundations of Free Markets, a recent book from the veteran British free-market Institute of Economic Affairs, brings together essays by nine leading experts in law and economics that delve into the interface between the legal system and the economy. The book blends historical analysis, economics, and legal theory, yielding many penetrating insights. Each [...]

5Jan2010 | George C. Leef | 2 comments | Continued

Government Must Keep Track of Derivatives?

Regardless of what caused the crisis, government efforts to regulate derivatives will only lock in undesirable aspects of the current market and ensure that politically connected players reap artificial gains. It is absurd to ask politicians to promote financial integrity and sound accounting. They are the worst violators of these principles on the planet.

17Jun2009 | Robert P. Murphy | 8 comments | Continued

How a Free Society Could Solve Global Warming

The phrase “global warming” has been around for quite some time, but in the past year it has captured the spotlight as never before. One can’t turn on the radio or open a newspaper without facing ads from “green” corporations, or hearing the latest way to reduce one’s “carbon footprint.” With even prominent Republicans (such [...]

1Oct2007 | Gene Callahan | 11 comments | Continued

Law and Property: The Best Hope for Liberty?

There is little left of the conventional protections for individualism in the modern world. Whatever theoretical virtues there may be in democracy (and there aren’t many1), in practice it has disintegrated into a struggle among self-regarding interest groups, mediated by government, over wealth that is exclusively created by private individuals.

1Jul2003 | Norman Barry | 1 comment | Continued

Law’s Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters by David D. Friedman

Princeton University Press • 2000 • 329 pages • $29.95 Law and economics, or the economic analysis of law, is a relatively new discipline. It was launched in the late 1950s and early 1960s and has grown in importance and in the number of its practitioners ever since. It uses key principles of economics—such as [...]

1Mar2001 | Charles W. Baird | 2 comments | Continued

The Fall and Rise of Freedom of Contract

This is a book about a turning of the tide. The tide in question is the intellectually important question of how society will treat contracts. Once a pillar of the common law and a cornerstone of the American legal system, by the 1970s the idea that people should be free to contract as they choose [...]

1Oct2000 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | Continued

The Cuyahoga Revisited

Stacie Thomas is an economist with the Senate Banking Committee in Washington, D.C. This is adapted from PERC Reports, June 1999. Early in the summer of 1969, the Cuyahoga River caught fire. Piles of logs, picnic benches, and other debris had collected below a railroad trestle, which impeded their movement down the river. These piles [...]

1May2000 | Stacie Thomas | 2 comments | Continued

Spontaneous Order

Nigel Ashford is senior lecturer in politics at the University of Staffordshire in England and coauthor of A Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought (Routledge, 1991). This article is adapted from his paper “Principles for a Free Society,” a primer for former communist countries. Reprinted by permission of the Jarl Hjalmarson Foundation of Stockholm. “Many [...]

1Jul1999 | Nigel Ashford | 19 comments | Continued

The Green Scare

Roger Meiners teaches in the economics department at the University of Texas, Arlington, and is a senior associate at PERC. During the Cold War, anti-communist activists were accused of using Red Scare tactics. They were parodied along these lines: The communists were everywhere, maybe even under your bed, so support the politicians who would spend [...]

1May1999 | Roger E. Meiners | 1 comment | Continued

Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order

Butler Shaffer is professor of law at Southwestern University School of Law and author of Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival (1985) and The Redistribution of Authority: Privately Owned Property as a System of Social Order (forthcoming). While studying political philosophy in college, I often pondered: why should my preferences for liberty [...]

1May1999 | Butler Shaffer | 0 comments | Continued

The Commons: Tragedy or Triumph?

In the summer I watch ruby-throated hummingbirds fly and hover near a feeder that my wife, Dot, carefully fills with nectar and hangs in view of our kitchen window. The store-bought nectar is colored red, since people think that hummingbirds find that color attractive. Business around the feeder picks up following rains that wash away [...]

1Apr1999 | Bruce Yandle | 9 comments | Continued

Law and Disorder in Cyberspace

Solveig Singleton is director of information studies at the Cato Institute. The subtitle of Peter Huber’s Law and Disorder in Cyberspace proudly proclaims the book’s main theme: “Abolish the FCC and Let Common Law Rule the Telecosm.” Huber proposes a free-market revolution for telephone, broadcasting, cable television, satellite, and Internet services, tempered with a few [...]

1Oct1998 | Solveig Singleton | 1 comment | Continued

Common Sense and Common Law for the Environment: Creating Wealth in Hummingbird Economies

Peter Hill is a senior associate of the Political Economy Research Center in Bozeman, Montana, and professor of economics at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. Surely one of the more problematic issues for people with a principled commitment to free markets is the environment. Such people generally have a deep respect for individual rights, and environmental [...]

1Aug1998 | Peter J. Hill | 1 comment | Continued

The Pervasive Duty to Rescue

Mr. Kochan is an Adjunct Scholar with The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational organization headquartered in Midland, Michigan. As individuals, Americans may choose to act as Good Samaritans and come to the aid of those in need, but are not legally obligated to do so. Traditionally under American law, no general [...]

1Jun1997 | Donald J. Kochan | 0 comments | Continued
Older Entries

    • © Copyright 2011 Freeman - Ideas on Liberty. All rights reserved.

    76 queries. 1.257 seconds